An angel brings food to Elijah as he sleeps.
Life is never a straight line. Even when you know where you want to go, you often find yourself off course. This is not the time to panic. It is also not a time to swing the wheel at random, hoping to fall into line with another traveler, or to be caught in a current. Movement seems reassuring, but we must make sure we are moving in the right direction. Sometimes stillness is the thing.
So with rest. God met Elijah in his rest, and ministered to him there, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” If the Spirit of God is calling us to rest, it is no good to work all day and night, even — perhaps especially — in God’s service and in his Name. God is patiently waiting for us in our beds, where we are prone and unmoving, our posture as helpless and as trusting as a baby’s. There are sermons to be written and preached, there are people who haven’t heard the gospel, there are hungry people who need to be fed, and lonely people who need to be noticed, but if God has said to us, “rest” we will not find him in the sermon, in the witnessing, in the hungry and the lonely. He is in our own bed, where he told us to meet him, if we would only listen.
Ten Thousand Places 
I’ve visited your blog before but I’m… “hanging out” at it right now. I can see (from the date of this post) that you wrote this post a quite a while ago. For what it’s worth, I really needed to read it just now.
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I’m glad, Judi. This is a lesson God has been pretty forceful about teaching me. He doesn’t love us for what we do, but because we are His. I had to come to the point where I could barely do anything — even shower or go to the store — before I could fully realize that.
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For someone who washes a lot of dishes, and changes a lot of diapers, this post is really thought provoking.
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