Consider the Image

At times, I’m able to ride my bike to work. On my ride, where the path runs alongside the Snohomish River, there is a spot I return to again and again. For a season I stopped there most weeks to photograph the same stretch of valley — not because it changed, but because it was never the same twice. Some mornings the water lay flat as glass and the far trees doubled themselves in it. Some mornings, like this one, mist rose off the surface and the climbing sun turned it to gold, and the whole valley seemed to be holding its breath. I made none of it. I only stopped long enough to see it. That, I have come to think, is most of what rest is: not producing beauty but receiving it — letting yourself be still long enough to notice the world was already lovely without your help, and that the God who made the quiet water is content, this morning, simply to have you near it.

Reflection

Psalm 23 says something that should be harder to hear than it is:

“You have bedded me down in lush meadows,”

The rest in that line is not something the sheep arranges. It is done to him. He is bedded down. His breath is given back. Even the direction of his life comes from another hand.

For much of my life I could not have received a single phrase of that psalm, because I was determined to be my own shepherd. Years ago, during a season of reorganization at egm, consultants were guiding the process, and one of them mentioned almost in passing that I was not exactly the typical type of person for my role. A few days later the other consultant told me about a school in another state looking for a headmaster — a door out, in case the one I was standing in closed. I had a house full of young children and a single income, and I was suddenly, quietly terrified. I decided then, though I would never have said it out loud, that I would put my family’s security in my own hands and never again let it sit in someone else’s. So I went back to school. If I made myself indispensable — more capable, more credentialed than anyone around me — then no one could ever again decide my family’s future for me.

Education was the instrument, but control was the point.

I did not know I had made education an idol. I found that out later during a “Genesis Process” training — a week of intense, interpersonal work I had gone to so that I could better lead the men in our recovery program. The Holy Spirit used it to convict me instead. I saw that education had become the thing I was running to, the way I outran my fear. It was not that learning was wrong; it never has been. It was that I was trusting in it. I had made it my provision and my shelter, the place I went instead of God.

When I finally saw it, I went home and withdrew from the program. I told my wife, and she sat down on the bed and wept. She had been doing everything she could to hold us together through it, and it had been quietly costing her everything. I had begun all of it to provide for the people I loved, and I was losing them — I barely knew my own children, and my marriage was strained thin. The very thing I was reaching for was the thing I was letting slip.

Being bedded down, for me, did not feel like a green meadow. It felt like being made to stop. But that is what the psalm actually describes — a God who will not let us run ourselves to death, who takes the reins of our provision and our direction out of our exhausted hands and says, lie down. I still love to learn. The men in our recovery program knew it; they didn’t ask me whether I stayed sober over the weekend, they asked how many books I bought.

I still buy books. But they are no longer where I hide.

That is the difference between striving and rest: not that the effort stops, but that the fear underneath it does.

Living the EGM Way

The people who reach us often cannot be bedded down either, and for the same reason I couldn’t. In their minds, they have to be their own shepherds — their own security, their own early-warning system — because trusting anyone, including God, isn’t safe.

So part of what we build here is a place where a person can finally stop running: predictable rhythms, a door that closes, a promise kept, a night of actual sleep. Putting safety forward before each person in our community.

But I have learned we cannot lead someone into a rest we refuse for ourselves.

A staff worn thin by its own striving cannot offer anyone else green pastures. Letting ourselves be bedded down — trusting God for the provision and the direction we keep trying to secure on our own — is not a break from the work. It is part of it.

Prayer for the Week

Practice for the Week

EGM Team, let yourself be bedded down this week. Choose one thing you are gripping — a worry, a plan, the need to be the one who has it all together — and set it in God’s hands for a day. Then take a rest you did not earn. Those of us who spend our days providing rest for others are often the worst at receiving it; notice what it costs you simply to lie down.