Hi, I’m Kirk Byron Jones!

After ministering that Sunday in my pastorate, Calvary Baptist Church in Chester, PA, I drove about 110 miles to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey for classes in a PhD program. Normally I would have remained overnight and driven back on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning. I had accepted an invitation to preach a five-night revival at St. Paul Baptist Church in West Chester, PA, where my friend from seminary days, Rev. Earl Trent, was pastor. So, after Monday’s class, I drove about 120 miles to West Chester.

I had just finished the introduction of my first sermon when suddenly, I stopped.

Now, I stopped before during sermons and learned how to steady myself through momentary breaks in concentration. I knew how to pause, refocus, and continue. That night was different. The extended pause was tolerable. It was after all a Black Baptist Church. In the sacred African American talk-back tradition of dialogical preaching, the congregation filled my silence with familiar expressions: “Alright, preacher.” “Well.” “Take your time.”

Still I did not utter a word. The capacity to speak remained. The energy had gone. I was in trouble, and the congregation eventually realized it because someone said, “Help him, Lord.”

That night while preaching—something I had been doing since my youth and enjoyed doing so much—I met burnout. My ordeal lasted for several months: anxiety attacks, heart palpitations, sleepless nights. My breakthrough was, in part, inspired by a physician’s rather ridiculous, redeeming question: “Reverend, what do you do to relax?”

I had no answer. And in having no answer, I had an answer.

About five or six years later, now pastoring Ebenezer Baptist Church in Boston, we were about to begin a funeral scheduled for noon, recess time at the elementary school next door. A summer day in an air-condition-less sanctuary meant that a large side door was open, facing the children rushing out to play. Just before I stood to conduct a ceremony of departure, children were running, jumping, and laughing. There we were trying to have a funeral, and they were having fun. I began feeling aggravated about the obvious conflict and contradiction: deep grief would now have to compete with thunderous delight.

It was then that I heard from upper management, and I am referring to God. I heard a question being asked of me that I certainly had not the time or interest in formulating: What do you think the deceased is doing now in my Presence?

I sat silent, stunned, and speechless. Graciously, I soon learned that the question was rhetorical: She is running, jumping, and laughing, so glad to be home. Carry on.

A third intrusion occurred by way of words offered up by Howard Thurman in a Baccalaureate Address at Spelman College on May 4, 1980:

There is something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

“Sound of the genuine” grabbed me and would not let me go. I found myself wanting to know that sound more deeply for myself. That longing led me to my soul.

Rest arrived first. Then Play. Then Soul. None of them knocked. They simply entered, took up residence, and began rearranging the furniture. I did not recruit them. I did not design them into my life. They found me—the way light finds a window that has been waiting without knowing it was waiting.

I begin my days now intentionally cultivating a relaxed spirit. Intervals of rest, which I call peace-pockets, are integral to my daily rhythm of being and doing. My doing welcomes lightheartedness, creative ingenuity, and surprise. Play is as sacred a word to me as pray. And soul. Oh my. To know that the deepest affirmation and acceptance of all is received from within rather than earned has given birth to a living ease and freedom beyond verbal expression. Rest, Play, and Soul have been three beats in me, producing sustainable wholeness and enduring vitality beyond words.

In this book, we will explore these three beats more deeply than I have ever attempted in prior books. Our journey will include offering strategies and practices for putting rest, play, and soul into practice to genuinely experience the relaxation, excitement, and fulfillment they bring.

Something else is being dared here. I wish to embark on an exciting adventure of discovering how the three beats are even more inspiring when they are lived together, when we practice a living awareness of their convergence. Such looming potency offers genuine hope for me in a world calling for deeper capacities of resilience and creative offerings. I trust that you can be just as excited about the potential awareness and agency unleashed by intentionally merging rest, play, and soul in living all the way alive like never before.

The world is breaking. The institutions we were told would hold are holding nothing. The air is wrong. The water is uncertain. Dystopia, that word we used to keep safely inside science fiction, has come out of the book and into the street. Into the body. Into the dream.

Which is precisely when someone will ask: what good is a book about such individualistic, recreational, and spiritual entities as rest, play, and soul? The question is fair. Rest sounds like personal indulgence. Play sounds like leisure for people who have the luxury of leisure. Soul sounds like church, a concern for another world while this one burns. Let the objection stand. It deserves to.

Here is the answer. The first thing collapse takes is your rest, the capacity to be still without panic. Then your play, the God-given right to respond creatively rather than only react. Then the felt sense that your soul is real, that something in you exists prior to the emergency and will exist after it. Exhausted people are controllable. Distracted people are gullible. Soulless people are erasable. This is not a book for purely personal advancement. It is a manual for vital wholeness with limitless communal life potential. Rested, playful, soulful persons have the energy, focus, and vision to change everything for the better.

Rest is an Inner Resident, a peace that abides in you whether the storm permits it or otherwise. Play is your inalienable right to creative response, given at your making and irrevocable. Soul is your irreducible identity, the part of you that exceeds every account any system has ever tried to make of you. These three are the ground. And this generative ground cannot collapse.

Moreover, as we journey together, embrace fully what is truly a fabulous wonder.

A story is told about the musk deer of North India. In the springtime, the musk deer is haunted by the odor of musk. He runs wildly over hill and ravine with his nostrils dilating and his little body throbbing with desire, sure that around the next clump of trees or bush he will find musk, the object of his quest. Then at last he falls, exhausted with his little head resting on his tiny hoofs, only to discover that the odor of musk he has been searching for is in his own hide.

How wondrous that realities so life-giving are within us…Already.