At the Good Way retreats, when we invite Young Life staff to practice a weekly Sabbath, there is first a spark of hope, and then a feeling of frustration washes across the room. Though our hearts, minds, bodies and souls are longing for deep rest, we don’t see how it is possible to live in the rhythms embedded in God’s DNA. Or, as Eugene Peterson said so well in The Message, we don’t believe it is actually possible to walk with Jesus in the “unforced rhythms of grace” (Matthew 11:28-30). We long for that rhythm, but the echo of some relentless slave driver within us protests, “But there is so much work to be done!” And, implied in that protest, “It is entirely up to us to do it!”

Is God good, and can He be trusted? Our chronic neglect of Sabbath seems to say, “Um, no.” And then we explain, “The world is actually resting upon MY shoulders. It’s up to ME to keep the world from falling apart. There is so much work to be done!”

During the early days of the pandemic, what was our first impulse? Was it an impulse to pause? Or was it an impulse to pivot? Did we pause and ask God what invitation He might have for us in this moment? Possibly an invitation to recalibrate and rest? Or did we pivot into overdrive and work harder than we had ever worked before? After months of sheltering at home, are we more rested now as a people? Or are we more exhausted?

Part of our exhaustion is due to the daily diet of trauma that has been served to us in this season. Now more than ever, we need to intentionally practice rhythms of rest. However, in crisis, our common inclination is to create an action plan. Instead of pausing, we pivot and our adrenaline takes over. We’re not suggesting that action plans aren’t important and even essential. We ARE suggesting, however, that INACTION plans are just as essential and part of God’s nature and design.

Parker Palmer in his book The Active Life​ put it this way, “Rather than speak of contemplation and action, we might speak of contemplation-and-action, letting the hyphens suggest what our language obscures: that one cannot exist without the other. When we fail to hold the paradox together, when we abandon the creative tension between the two, then both ends fly apart into madness…Action flies off into frenzy--a frantic and even violent effort to impose one’s will on the world, or at least to survive against the odds. Contemplation flies off into escapism—a flight from the world into a realm of false bliss.”

Palmer notices three stages of our response to the paradox of action and contemplation. The first stage, the separation​ stage, is when we view action/contemplation as an either/or proposition. In other words, we ignore the hyphens.

The second stage is the alternation​ stage. “Exhausted by activity,” Palmer writes, “we take a little vacation to refresh ourselves, then we plunge back into action until we are exhausted again, then we take another vacation.”

The final stage is the stage of integration. We integrate action and contemplation into a life-giving rhythm, discovering that the two are woven together at the root: “Their root,” Palmer says, is our deep desire “to be fully alive.”