I Feel Guilty On A Slow Day

There was nothing on Tuesday.

And instead of the day being a day, it was six hours of a particular feeling and then an evening of being tired without having done anything.

Here is what happened in those six hours. You checked the phone. You did something for twenty minutes that was not really anything. You thought about messaging somebody about work and did not. You felt bad. You checked the phone again.

That is not rest and it is not work. It is a third thing, and it is the most exhausting of the three.

You are allowed to rest on an empty day, and a day with no work in it has never once been the same thing as a wasted one.

Let me name the confusion underneath it, because I think it is a real one and not a moral failing.

You have two categories: working, and wasting time. That is it. Those are the two.

So a day with no work in it can only be filed under wasting time, and a person filing eight hours of their own life under wasting time is going to feel exactly how you felt on Tuesday evening.

There is a third category and nobody handed it to you.

Come ye yourselves apart, and rest a while

There is a moment in Mark where a group of people come back from working hard, and the instruction they get is not what anybody expects.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.

That is an instruction rather than a permission. It is given by somebody with authority, to people who were in the middle of genuinely urgent work, and it is given because they had not eaten.

You are inside an instruction to rest given to people whose work was not finished, and rest has never once been described there as something earned by completing everything. Mark 6:31 says come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that as a command from the one in charge.

And look at the reason attached. For there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.

The reason is not that they had done enough. The reason is that the pace had made an ordinary human thing impossible.

You have a reason for rest that has nothing to do with whether the work is done, and a body needing to stop has never once required a finished week to justify it. The Holy Spirit is the one who notices the eating, and it is written in Mark 6:31 with the demand still going on around them.

The third category

So here is the category nobody gave you, and it is worth naming properly.

There is working. There is wasting time. And there is resting, which is different from both, and which has a shape of its own.

Wasting time is the phone, the half thing, the twenty minutes that leave you tireder than when you started. It is not restful. It never was.

Resting is deliberate. It has a beginning. It usually involves the body, or the outside, or another person, or sleep, and afterward there is more of you than there was before.

You are able to tell those two apart once somebody names them, and a slow day spent resting has never once been the same as a slow day spent scrolling. The written word sends people to a quiet place on purpose, and the Spirit of God is the one who marks out the difference between stopping and drifting.

And here is the thing that will probably help most, and it is completely practical.

The guilt on a slow day is not really about the day. It is about the phone in your hand, because your body knows the difference between rest and the third thing even when your head does not.

Decide the day is a rest day, out loud, at nine in the morning. And then rest on purpose, which means doing something that is actually restful rather than waiting to feel entitled to it.

You are able to decide what a day is at nine in the morning, and a day given a name has never once gone the same way as a day left undecided. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a decision that small, and Mark 6:31 has the rest arranged deliberately rather than falling out of a gap.

Say what came in, however small

So the assignment, and on a slow week it is the exact right one.

Name out loud what came in this week, however small, and thank God for it by name.

Because here is what a slow week does to a young person. It erases the good days. By Friday, a week with three decent days and two empty ones has become, in the head, an empty week.

Saying the pieces out loud puts the three decent days back, because they actually happened.

You are able to say the days that actually happened, and a week with three good days in it has never once been an empty week. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a record straight, and the written word sends tired people to rest without first auditing their output.

And do it on the slow week rather than the good one. That is when it is worth something.

You are able to say a short list out loud on a bad week, and a list said when it is hardest has never once counted for less than a list said when it is easy. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a Tuesday with nothing in it, and it is written in Mark 6:31 that the rest was commanded in the middle of the pressure rather than after it.