The Hidden Find

Twenty-five years ago, I welcomed relaxation and rest into my life, to the betterment of every dimension of my life. But only recently has a new revelation about rest changed everything again. This new awareness arrived without a specific moment I can point to. I can only say that years of intentionally living rest led to a new understanding of the creation narrative.

In the traditional telling, rest usually brings up the rear — God resting on the seventh day. The deeper truth that has caused a definite shift in me is that rest does not just follow creation. It precedes and seeds creation:

The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.

And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

—Genesis 1:2

Sit with the image of God hovering over the deep. Unhurried. Easeful. Present to everything and striving toward nothing. It is out of this relaxed expression of God that ecstatic creation occurs. Genesis creative dynamism does not just conclude with rest, it commences from rest. And divine restfulness marks all of creation’s splendor from then to this very moment. This is the hidden find: rest was there first.

Here is something to sit with: abiding, continual rest — not merely climactic rest — was present at creation and remains present and available for us all.

With rest understood as abiding in God from the beginning, we can comprehend it not merely as momentary respite from action, but as a continual state of relaxed grace that infuses all of life. Rest as a pervasive posture of ease and presence underlying all activity, transforming how we work, relate, and create. Rest as the ground we stand on, not the bed we sleep in.

This reframes rest from something we do — take a break, go on vacation — to something we are. A fundamental quality of being that persists even during activity. Not the absence of engagement but a quality of presence, ease, and non-striving that coexists with dynamic action. As in music, silence is not merely the absence of sound but an active ingredient that gives sound shape, meaning, and beauty. Rests create the rhythm, the breathing room, the structure that allows melody to emerge. Where there are no rests, there is no music. Rests are part of the song.

Where does this bring us? Nearer to rest, and rest nearer to us, as abiding presence ever available for receiving and embracing. Rest is not something far off, recurring only at the sign of our exhaustion. Rest is a breath away, capable of flavoring all we are and all we do with relaxed confidence and patient enthusiasm.

We learn to live not toward rest, but from rest.