God Will Give You Rest

Imagine that you are a call center supervisor who has the potential to be promoted as the next operations manager. You work longer hours to meet deadlines, attend high profile meetings, finish your deliverables and still manage to hang out with your subordinates after shift to “build relationships” and make sure their performance remains excellent. You only get 4-5 hours of sleep per day, that is if you’re not busy running errands during your “free time.”

Or maybe you’re a preschool teacher, like me, who takes care of very young children in school – teaching them how to read and write, while integrating all these activities with arts and physical education. You sometimes bring home test papers so you can finish checking them and complete their report cards. On Saturdays, you attend graduate school and other professional development seminars, submitting a ton of requirements to get good grades and earn that elusive master’s degree. To top it all off, you have your own children to raise and a husband to serve. When you get home every night, you must help the children with their homework, and make sure they are enrolled in weekend sports activities, music lessons or acting classes. You are a working mother – a successful career woman – who also has civic and social responsibilities plus a large circle of friends. You even have time to go to the gym to lose weight or to inspire others to get fit and live an active lifestyle.

Or perhaps, you’re starting a small business and managing a few employees. Your children are in college where you pay exorbitant amounts for their tuition, in addition to your home mortgage and car loans. You have credit card debts that are blown up because of hospital bills and unnecessary purchases. You sometimes also work at home and during the weekends, that is if it’s not the schedule to take your wife and children to a grand vacation or another shopping spree. You know you’d rather be saving up for your quickly depleting emergency fund, but all your friends post pictures of their frequent out-of-the-country trips and you don’t want to be called a loser.

Whoever you are, wherever you live, you must be under a lot of pressure to succeed, to exceed expectations, to be rich and popular, to be a wonderful parent and a cool friend, to be interesting and intelligent, to stay relevant and opinionated. You have 1,001 items in your bucket list and you’re quite sure you can tick them all off before your 40^th birthday.

There are days when you get really tired. You get stressed and sick, feeling drained. You wonder why the expensive vitamins and food supplements are just not that effective. You get overwhelmed with your busy schedule and the attention that your loved ones demand. If you were in Colorado, at the end of the day you could smoke marijuana legally to help with your insomnia and day-to-day anxiety. If you lived in a cramped city like Tokyo, you could drop by a cat café after work to sip delicious coffee while petting a cute kitty. Here in the Philippines, you could simply go to a bar after office hours to get drunk and smoke cigarettes that are guaranteed to help you relax. The next day, you wake up with a massive headache, but you just have to deal with that stress someway, somehow.

Most of us fall prey to the cult of productivity at different times in our lives. There’s just too much pressure at work, in our families, in our society. Working hard and fulfilling responsibilities are innately good things, except when they get out of hand, when they take over what is truly important. We may be under a lot of pressure to excel in everything we do because conventional wisdom dictates that we only live once, hence we must live life to the fullest.

One of the reasons could be envy or covetousness – the desire to have other people’s qualities or possessions. It may also be pride or self-conceit – the desire to be better than others. It seems like each person is in competition with everyone else.

In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand writes: 

“Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy.” 

It will be a never-ending cycle, unless we give up the struggle. But what if there’s no way to stop? We must continue to work because we have bills to pay and a family to feed; there is nothing wrong with that. However, we need to have priorities and give up the things that weigh us down. Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it.

If you believe in God, you do believe that life is full of suffering but we have a God that comforts and strengthens us.

If you don’t believe in God, the bad news is that you will always be exhausted and deceived. You will experience the wear and tear of life because that is normal. A religious woman once asked a male atheist friend how he coped with the death of his father the previous year, because her father had also just died a week ago. She wrote, “He's dead and in the ground. I take great comfort in thinking that he's in a good place. Do we just become fertilizer, end of story? I am not questioning your beliefs and the why or where of it. I'm just asking what you think is the next step. If you think it's fertilizer, please lie to make it more interesting.”

Someday, you will stop working and retire. Your children will grow up and have families of their own. Your spouse will die, or you will die first. “When two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other,” wrote C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed.

Then Jesus said, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

How exactly does that work? I can think of at least three ways:

• You stop being self-centered. You stop talking about yourself, stop promoting yourself, stop bragging about yourself and your accomplishments. You stop telling people you have a lot of money and can buy anything. You stop feeling like a celebrity when you get one hundred likes on every one of your Facebook statuses. You stop pretending that your life is always perfect, or that your children are flawless, or that your spouse is amazing. Now, I am going to say this with a lot of love: you are not the center of the universe. You stop the unnecessary self-glorification because God will give you the grace and humility to see the wonder of his sovereign love.

•  You start to have a clear, definite purpose in life: to glorify God. And by the way, you have to go to a genuine Christ-exalting church and read the Bible thoroughly to discover how loving, gentle and merciful God is. You have to understand that God is holy and that He knit you in your mother’s womb. You have to really believe that you are special in God’s eyes and everything He does is for your good, whether you like it or not. In his bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for? Rick Warren explains it beautifully:

“If not to God, you will surrender to the opinions or expectations of others, to money, to resentment, to fear, or to your own pride, lusts, or ego. You were designed to worship God and if you fail to worship Him, you will create other things (idols) to give your life to. You weren't put on earth to be remembered. You were put here to prepare for eternity."

• Finally, you walk by faith, not by sight. You begin to put your faith in God. You have daily needs? God provides. Is your child sick? God heals. Is your family broken? God restores relationships. Did you lose your job? God can replace what you’ve lost. Are you emotionally wounded? God is close to the brokenhearted. You no longer worry too much because someone above you is going to help you and take care of your needs. Each time He says, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in [your] weakness." 

Now, what happens next? Well, you continue to work, to take care of your family, to pursue your hobbies, to reach those goals in life – but this time, with a quiet confidence that through good and bad times, God is with you. You will never feel alone again. The pressure will be lifted. The stress will be eliminated.

Know that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. The first step is to trust Him because you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I believe it is the best decision you can make in life, and if you would like to take a rest from all your problems, fears and distractions, come to Jesus now and pray this short prayer with me: 

Lord Jesus, I am very tired and weary. Today, I make the decision to trust you and believe that you can set me free from all things that bring me down. Please touch my heart and change the direction of my life so that I no longer have to be exhausted and worried again. I put my faith that you are the only way to God and that you truly care for me. Please give me rest from all my anxieties. Thank you very much for loving me. Amen.

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As I celebrate my 34th birthday, I would love to remember and savor God's faithfulness in my life. I will say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust." (Psalm 91:2)

Basti and I had lunch with my parents at Savory - The District Imus.
A father’s goodness is higher than the mountain,
a mother’s goodness deeper than the sea. - Japanese Proverb

While waiting for Daddy Marvin in SM Southmall, Basti and I took some selfies and I noticed the wrinkles around my eyes. Yes, I know I am old. Here's a good Mark Twain quote to remember: "Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been."

We had an early dinner in Sambokojin, SM Southmall where you can dine for free if it's your birthday, and as Maya Angelou said,
“I sustain myself with the love of family.”

Celebrating 34 years of God's grace and mercy: To God be the glory!