Rhythms

It's that time! Time for that every six-month exercise where we tear an hour off of one end of the day and paste it on the other end. Somehow, the falling back of Daylight Savings Time seems a bit less stressful since we get an extra hour of sleep to make up for the one taken from us in the spring. Being a morning person, I prefer my extra daylight on the beginning end of my day, so I am looking forward to Sunday.

Our little exercise with that hour in no way changes the rhythm of time that God established at the beginning of time. Whatever we do with that hour, put it on the ends or in the middle, does not change the fact that there are but twenty-four of them in a day, seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, and twelve months in a year. Thankfully, we have not tried Daylight Savings Week yet.

God created these rhythms of time for our advantage and benefit. And for most of history, they worked rather well. Along with those units of time, God also wove four seasons into each year. Being raised on a farm, I am very aware of the rhythms of the seasons, for they governed our lives, or as God said in Genesis 8:22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

Today, my garden is covered with snow, and it is cold outside. The time for digging in the dirt and mowing the lawn is over for a few months. This too is part of God’s created order, which He determined from the beginning.

Before the industrial age and inventions of things such as electricity and light bulbs, mankind lived life according to these God-given rhythms. Psalm 104:22-23 tells us, “When the sun rises…man goes forth to his work and to his labor until evening.”

There was a time that when the sun went down, mankind rested from their labors. Life was governed by sunrise and sunset. Not so today, with all of our whiz-bang gadgetry, we can now labor twenty-four hours a day, and many attempt to do just that. With the dawn of the personal computer, we can now sit down at home and open up the files of the work we left behind when we left work.

That same technology also offers up a plethora of entertainment options that one can be engaged in into the wee hours of the night. It seems that our days are filled with either work or play, leaving precious little time for contemplation and rest. No wonder we’re so tired. My old friend, Leonard Ravenhill, once said that America’s epitaph would be, “She entertained herself to death.”

During His sojourn on earth, Jesus called out to those who were weary and worn down by life. In his paraphrase of the New Testament titled The Message, Eugene Peterson put the passage like this, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out? Come to Me. Get away with Me and you will recover your life. I will show you how to take a real rest. Walk with Me and work with Me, watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with Me and you will learn to live freely and lightly” (Matthew 11:28-30).

God’s Word often calls us to quietness and rest. Psalm 23:2-3, “He leads me beside quiet waters, He restores my soul.” Isaiah 28:12, “He said to them, ‘Here is rest, give rest to the weary, and here is repose, but they would not listen.”

What are our choices? Either we can find ways to surrender our lives more completely to God’s ordained rhythms, or we can be caught up in the vortex of the rat race going on around us. No one can make this choice for you, you must decide.