Life Rhythms

For many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer months bring a change of pace – no school, holidays, gardening, weather changes. It can be a time of rest and refreshing. We are reminded that life has rhythms, periods of harvest and others of rest.  

Author and public speaker, Wayne Muller, reminds us that with electric lights making artificial day, we can now work without stopping. “But remember,” he writes, “No living thing lives like this. There are greater rhythms that govern how life grows: seasons and sunsets and great movements of seas and stars…We are part of the creation story, subject to all its laws and rhythms. To surrender to the rhythms of seasons and flowering and dormancies is to savor the secret of life itself. Many scientists believe that we are hard-wired like this, to live in rhythmic awareness…It follows then, that the commandment to remember the Sabbath is not a burdensome requirement from some law-giving deity - ‘You ought, you’d better, you must’ – but rather a remembrance of a law this is firmly embedded in the fabric of nature.” (Sabbath, Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives, p. 69) 

Yet, too often we believe the lie that we must always be productive, that every season is harvest. We become human-doings rather that human beings. We forfeit God’s gift. 

So take time each week and these months (or when you have a natural break) to rest, be dormant, replenish your soul for the next season.