Come to Me

Jet lag leaves a body weary, sleeping at the wrong time of day, awake when everyone else is sleeping. 

One of our B&B guests told me today that every Monday he experiences ‘van lag’, because he has to rise so early to drive over a hundred miles north to start his working week. Of course he is not crossing time zones but missing hours of refreshing sleep.

It doesn’t take much for a body to grow weary, especially as the years add up. But there is another kind of weariness from which it is harder to bounce back. Soul weariness. Weariness of life itself. It isn’t just us in our modern, high-tech and high-pressured world who feel such weariness; a man called Elijah in the Bible was so tired of being the pariah of Israel, hunted by the Queen herself with an intention of murdering him, that he ran away and languished under a bush in a desert, longing for death. He was weary, world weary.

God knows that some of us are more tried than others. He knows that many have good reason to be world weary. And he offers respite.

Come to me, Jesus invites. All who are weary, and I will give you rest. 

Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, Moses said about the tribe of Benjamin. The one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders. A good vantage point. A safe place. 

It’s hard to see yourself as beloved of anyone, sometimes, let alone of the Lord. Who indeed is good enough to be loved by the Lord of all?

Well, nobody is, but Jesus died for everyone, before they were ‘good enough’. None of us is good enough. But still we are the beloved of the Lord. 

So how do we enter his rest? How do we experience that safe place on the shoulders of the Almighty?

By seeking him in places where he can be found. The Bible. A good church. Christian friends. In the wilderness, along the ocean, on the mountaintop. It may seem, for ages, like there’s nobody there but our imagination. How wrong we are if we stop seeking. We all have further to go, and deeper to go in his rest.

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Wherever you are; whatever your circumstances. He hears every voice that calls out to him, the cry of every person who looks for him. 

Come to me, he says, and I will give you rest.