I’m away from the Alban Weekly for a couple of weeks, but I’ll be back in your inbox on August 11! In the meantime, I’d like to introduce this week’s guest contributor: the Rev. Dr. A. Trevor Sutton, who serves as the senior pastor of St. Luke Lutheran Church in Lansing, Michigan. He’s the author of “Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits” (co-authored with Dr. Brian Smith, MD). He teaches, writes and speaks frequently about technology and the church in a digital age. You can find out more at his website. – Prince 

Sustained rest has evaded me this summer. Instead, it’s been a season of endless obligations. This past month was full of funerals and weddings, vacation Bible school and conferences, speaking engagements and meetings. Oh, and we renovated a bathroom in our house and got a new puppy.  

How about you? Has your summer been restful, restless or somewhere in between? 

The relentless pace of summer so far has me thinking about work and rest. We often approach the two as a binary: You are either working or resting, but not both. Work and rest are like a light switch that is either on or off. There is work time. There is rest time. And work-life balance separates work from rest.  

What if there was a better way to approach work and rest? A more integrated — and realistic — approach is seeing them as threads woven together into the tapestry of daily life. Every week, hour and minute is interwoven with work and rest. Rest will evade us unless we can somehow integrate it into our daily work. We need to rest at work and work with rest. While it is vital to have sustained periods of rest and a rhythm of a weekly Sabbath, we also need to integrate rest into our days, hours and minutes.  

How might we weave rest into our work? One way is by discerning what aspects of your work are restful and energizing. Some of our work tasks drain our resources, while other work-related tasks leave us more energized. Our daily work needs to be interwoven with that which is life-giving. What kind of tasks fall into this category for you? Is it learning, creative problem-solving or thoughtful conversations? Perhaps it is networking, organizing or strategizing. These are small ways that you can rest at work and work with rest.  

Resources

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Before you go

Recently, I met a teacher at a conference where I was speaking. He had just finished an exhausting school year. And yet this teacher was so energized by what he was learning at the conference that he wanted to get right back into the classroom. He was working, but this work was bringing him both rest and energy. 

This is an example of resting at work and weaving work and rest together. He had clearly found a life-giving aspect of his work — learning new things and honing his teaching skills — and this brought him rest and renewal.  

But not everyone appreciates this approach to work and rest. In the Gospel of Mark, we hear about the Pharisees chastising Jesus and his disciples for working on the Sabbath. The Pharisees believed in a very sharp demarcation between working and resting.  

Jesus, however, invited them to consider times in Scripture when people had integrated work and rest. Jesus then depicts rest as a gift: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Let’s receive God’s gift of rest and let it permeate all parts of our lives — including our work.