Labor Days

It's Labor Day, meaning that most of us have the day off, snatching some fun (or a nap) before the week begins on Tuesday. If all goes as it should, Nathan and I'll be hitting the Lake with family in just a little over an hour, for some Last-Drops-of-Summer skiing.

Regardless of activity (or inactivity) though, today is supposed to be a day of rest, and that got me thinking...

On Saturday, I audaciously decided to join a group of women from my church on a mini-retreat, starting around 8:30am. Most Saturdays, I'm still unconscious until about 9, so that's what I use the word audacious. Anyway, the reason I decided to do it was because allll summer I thought about having a day, or at least a morning, where I took time out to simply listen to and focus on God.

It never happened.

Something always kept coming up--a doctor appointment, an article due, or...or.. something.

This Saturday I could have come up with an excuse, but I was feeling particularly needy (school has just started, after all) so I went.

It was wonderful, and I especially liked hearing from the other women, what they were experiencing, how they felt, and how they processed it spiritually.

From our conversations, and my own reading that morning, the word that stood out to me from the day, though, was "trust"--as in, how much I trust the Lord. I realized not much.

I've written about my control tendencies many times, but that morning I finally understood what it meant in terms of my relationship with God, how I see God. Because I think I have to hold the universe together, I worry, I have anxiety, I stress, and get mean and snappy. It means my relationships really aren't as good as I'd like them to be, it means I often lose sight of what's important.

It often means I miss out on listening to God. Like this summer.

It occurred to me, then, that it takes trust to rest--trust that God's holding the universe's atoms together and that we don't have to; trust that we CAN take time to do God's will, to listen to Him, to follow Him, because HE is in control, not us.

In other words, we can rest, because He is working.

As we head into Labor Day, a day of rest, a day when most of us can take a load off, I'm also thinking of it as a day of trust--a day when I rest from my all-too frantic attempts to control and remember that it is Someone else's responsibility, not mine.