Jesus wants us to rest.  His kind of rest. “Come to me, all of you who are weary, and I will give you rest,” he says.  The Christian life should not be a burden, yet choices we make to stay in a perpetual state of busy-ness force it to become just that.

Dave and I are in Las Vegas, and this past week we rode e-bikes to Boulder City, about 10 miles away, for breakfast. If you’re not familiar with e-bikes, they are amazing.  You pedal but choose a gear (0-Race mode).  Some of our crazier relatives ride only in Race-mode, but I stay in the lower gears unless there is a hill, and then I press “2” and let the bike do most of the work.  I still pedal, just to pretend that I’m doing something.

On our ride, we passed legitimate bikers who had no battery pack to assist them.  They struggled to pedal up the steep hills as we passed them with ease.  Of course, they were getting a work out that we weren’t, but our ride was relaxing and fun and stressless.  Only one time did I accidentally hit the throttle and propel myself forward, narrowly missing Dave’s bike, but other than that, our excursion was easy-breezy.

Not so with the regular bikers.

The Christian journey should be more akin to the restful, e-bike experience.  At least, that’s the way Jesus would desire it to be, for Jesus-rest allows us to find solace and renewal that only he can offer.  Sometimes, he even permits an injury or sickness to slow us down. In Psalm 23:2, David, the shepherd boy-turned king, wrote this about God: “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters.”  Get that?  He “makes me.”  Jesus knows that we require rest, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Still, we choose to stubbornly dig in our heels to the point of exhaustion in order to meet the goals we have set for ourselves.  In that, we miss God-goals.  Yesterday in our Bible study, one woman spoke about her judgmentalism towards homeless people and how God stopped her from rushing past them on the street last week when one said to her, “Love God.”  She paused and asked him to repeat what he had just said.  “Love God,” he restated, as if a directive from the Lord Himself.

She shared with us that sometimes we encounter angels in human clothing and instead of dismissing them because we are rushing to check something off of our to-do list, we need to recognize that God might have other plans.  The woman admitted that she (pedaling through life as fast as she could?) has never stopped a stranger with those words, yet a homeless man (allowing God to do all the work?) had shared them with her.

In the article “Scripture Savvy,” Jamie Wilson writes that being still doesn’t just refer to physical stillness but also to a quieting of our hearts and minds. “It is an invitation to trust in God’s wisdom and plans, knowing that He is in control and will be exalted in every situation…Resting in God is not passive; it requires an active surrender of our lives and a recognition of His saving work in our hearts. It is a conscious decision to find our security and peace in Him alone.”

Say what you want, but in life, especially in this spiritual journey, I will take all the help I can get.