Five Essential Rhythms for Finding Rest for Your Soul

In a season of life, I served as the corporate chaplain for the staff of a car dealership. One day as I was making the rounds through one of our shops, my eye was caught by a relatively new car that I saw up on the lift. A brand-new engine was being prepped for installation.

"What's the story here?" I asked the technician because this was an unusual sight.

"Well, the owner bought it brand new not even a year ago. They never got the oil changed. They just drove it until the engine seized up."

Most of us (though, clearly, not all of us) know that a big investment like a new car or a new house requires regular maintenance. We know that good and nice things require our attention so that we end up getting what we paid for.

Are our souls, our very selves, made in the image of the infinite, Creator God, more valuable than a machine? Without rhythms of rest—rhythms that infuse our work with its deepest meaning and freshest creativity—we wind up like that new car on the lift with a ruined engine.

Our bodies are sustained by rhythms—the pulse of our heart, the in and out of our lungs. There are daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms we can enter into that sustain our souls.

Daily Examen

Think back over the last 24 hours. How many things do you do every day? Make coffee? Go to the gym? Check in with loved ones? Scroll social media? Take a shower? How many of these things do you do automatically? My guess is you already have a dozen things you do daily automatically. Seen or unseen, our days are made up of habits.

One of the many gifts of the exercises of St. Ignatius is the practice of the Daily Examen. It represents a commitment to stop and reflect on the day. The simple action to interrupt the busyness of the day with a pause and to think is such a powerful thing.

Within the 5-10 minutes of that pause consider: What am I grateful for today? During what moments did I feel close to God? Were there moments when I did not feel close to God? Did I do or neglect to do things that now require me to offer myself in reconciliation? And what's coming next?

This doesn't have to be an epic journaling session. What's important is the intentional stop with reflection. This can be done with your morning coffee, reflecting over the previous 24 hours. It could be the last thing before turning out the light. We could be done in conversation with your family over dinner.

This is a daily opportunity to bring our attention to God and God's desires for us, our neighborhood, and the world.

Sabbath

In Genesis chapter 1, we are introduced to a God who practices Sabbath. In Exodus 20 we find among the initial agreements between God and the fledgling community whose job is to represent this God to the rest of the world is the command to Sabbath.

The invitation to Sabbath isn't a nice spiritual discipline to figure out whenever it's convenient, if it ever is. It's one of the 10 Commandments.

A friend recently visited the Abbey of the Heights for a day retreat. They serve on staff at a local church, and they told me, "Our pastor gives us a Sabbath day once each month." I commonly hear people (in professional ministry, especially) equate "Sabbath" with any kind of time off. But this isn't the way the Scriptures talk about Sabbath. Pastors, or supervisors, don't give Sabbath. God does. And it's a weekly rhythm.

Sabbath is a rhythm of six-plus-one. It is six days of work and one day of rest. I've found it helpful to think of Sabbath as "Opposite Day." It's the day when I can say "yes" to all the things I said "no" to during the week (things that are typically fun or good for my soul) and "no" to all the things I said "yes" to during the week (whether work or mindless activity like scrolling my phone).

It is part of the design of being human that we make things and that we take a break from making things for a 24-hour period once each week.

Retreat

One of our convictions in opening the Abbey of the Heights was that our world needs more places where we can find silence, stillness, and solitude. As noted above, retreat is something different than Sabbath. We need both.

We have a hospice chaplain who comes to the Abbey once a month for a day retreat. She paid for a year's worth of visits up front and asked us to put her on the schedule for the same day each month. I've had other guests utilize the Abbey for quarterly multi-night retreats. When I was a seminary student in Kentucky, once during the semester I'd take a day at the Abbey of Gethsemani to wander the grounds, pray, journal, and soak in the quiet.

For leaders especially, this rhythm of retreat can be a game-changer. When our day-to-day feels like drinking from a fire hydrant, taking 4 hours out of the office monthly or 3 overnights quarterly provides an opportunity to refocus on your WHY and regain a sense of what all the busyness is for. It can be a chance to review your rule of life, to make yourself unavailable to the onslaught of notifications, to revel in extended quiet with God, or work on passion project that's been shoved to the margins of your attention.

Vacation

In addition to these rhythms, we need an extended annual rhythm where we can turn off our work selves. This is what vacation is for. Ideally, take a week, more if possible, to disengage from the pressing demands of work to enjoy the world around you.

I was blessed to be raised in a family that took an annual summer vacation. Some years it was simply an extended weekend to a bigger city, maybe a half day's drive away to enjoy an amusement park or professional baseball game. Other years it was a road trip to Rocky Mountain National Park for the week.

In spiritual direction, I am frequently asking pastors and ministry workers, "What are you doing for your next vacation?" In places I have worked, both in and out of the church, I have found co-workers who neglected to use the vacation days that they were benefitted. It's good for our souls to anticipate good things. For ministry people, it's good for our souls to be every bit as generous to ourselves and our families as we are to the people we serve and report to.

Sabbatical

In the book of Leviticus, where we find God defining the terms for this new community of God's people, we find that the rhythm of six-plus-one is like a concentric circle. It's more than a rhythm of days in the week. Living well within time also invites us to consider a cycle of six years plus one and also six of these cycles plus one.

Our contemporary world is far from the world of redeemed slaves of Leviticus. But God still invites us to live as friends of time and to have healthy relationships with our work and with our rest. Consider work differently every seven years. Like Sabbath as "Opposite Day," perhaps Sabbatical can be "Opposite Year." It may need to be six months, three months, or a month, depending on your employment.

Sabbatical isn't vacation. It is an extended time for unplugging from the heaviness of our work responsibilities. It is an opportunity to consider the really big questions related to our vocation. It might mean focusing your gifts in a special way that doesn't otherwise have a place in your regular work. It might mean a refreshing unplugging of your mind. It may be a season of discerning a change of vocation or reconsidering calling. It’s an intentional time of inner reset.

Experiment with grace

We live in a world where we have been trained from birth to crush our goals, to prove our worth, and to accomplish everything we can dream. But nothing in this cultural story respects what it means to be human, made in God's image. This is the way of Pharaoh and not of Yahweh. Learning to rest in this world can be like learning a new language.

So give yourself grace as you learn and enter into and practice these rhythms. They won't come natural. They won't just happen to you. They won't come easy. They are skills to hone slowly over time. And "slowly over time" is key. Give yourself ample grace. You will blow it. You will forget to rest. You will be frustrated. Your season of life may be completely at odds with one or more of these rhythms. God knows that. God knows everything that is on your plate. You are only responsible for what God has given you. Experiment with what you can do.

It may be that you need one or more these rhythms to help you discern the difference between the things that God has given you and the things that you have chosen. God has made us to be friends with time, and these practices are just a few ways that we can remember that.

If you would like to schedule a retreat at the Abbey of the Heights, please contact us. We would love to host you soon.

If you would like to dive deeper into these practices, be sure to explore these great resources:

Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away With God by Ruth Haley Barton

Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again by Ruth Haley Barton

On Holiday with God: Making Your Own Retreat With God by Sue Pickering