Come You Who Are Weary.

Come You Who Are Weary

Matthew  11:28-30 invites us to come in our tiredness and weariness.  It implies that coming in this way assures a lighter load.  Most of us seem to experience our spiritual life as anything but lighter.  Instead our spiritual life is often heavy, burdensome and exhausting.  Why?  Perhaps we are trying to “do” God rather than enter into a relationship with Him.  Often our prayers are petitions to God to help us do something or a request for Him to do something.  Our spiritual activity is more often motivated by guilt of what we should be doing for God.  Where is the rest? 
    Many times our spiritual life leaves us hopeless, lonely and depressed.  The main reason we feel this spiritual and emotional turmoil is because we have filled our lives with substitutes and false loves.  We have forgotten how to rest.
    Rest is more than the absence of doing something.  It is more than stillness.  Rest calls to us.  We are asked to find rest but to find rest we must venture deeply into the invitation of Christ.  Rest requires everything.  Rest requires the paradox of our life: faith and fear; acceptance and rejection; selflessness and selfishness; ambition and mediocrity – all of us.  Rest is unbiased in its treatment of all.
    While rest calls to all and all who seek rest find it, finding it takes time.  Rest comes only as we surrender.  It will never come by force or demand nor can it be bought or sold.  It is not something to be won or conquered.  Rest comes as we trust and let go.  There are no short cuts or magic passageways to make it easier.  Rest only comes by answering Christ’s call to come and lay down which requires absolute surrender. 
    Rest in Christ.  He is the lover of your soul.  Your best interest is at his heart.  Trust his love for you.  If trust is the first step of rest then surrender is the second.  Be brave enough to surrender the false loves and the false self.  Be who you are.  Christ doesn’t love us in spite of who we are but because of who we are. 

Matthew 11:28-30

Henri Nouwen – The Way of the Heart
“Without solitude, we remain acolytes of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.”

Thomas Merton – The Ascent of Truth
“We look for rest and if we find it, it becomes intolerable.  Incapable of the divine activity which alone can satisfy [rest] … fallen man flings himself upon exterior things, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of agitation which keeps his spirit pleasantly numb … [the distraction] divers us aside from the one thing that can help us to begin our ascent to truth … the sense of our own emptiness.

Comments

[Chris Dart]

Hey, Tammy -- I am trying to reach you on behalf of Polished Arrow, a Native American Christian ministry--we are updating our directory of Native-oriented ministries, and your email link at Legacy Ministries is bouncing back and so I thought I'd get ahold of you here!

To keep this short, please shoot me an email at Lad.dartist at gmail.com; we just want to make sure that the contact info we have for The Legacy is correct, namely who the primary contact person is for the ministry and also if there are any particular reservations you work with or have relationships with.

Thanks so much!
Chris