Seeking True Rest
By: Rachel Marinko
What is it about unstructured time that catches us unawares? Every college student can relate to the experience of squandering that two-hour chunk of free time that had looked so full of promise earlier in the day. You crave the freedom of those hours as you dash from class to meetings to class, thinking of all the things you’ll be able to accomplish. Then the time comes, and before you know it you’ve wasted an hour of it on Instagram reels. Is this really such a bad thing? Sure, you may have to stay up a little later to finish your reading for the next day, but you really needed that break in the middle of the day. No one can be productive at every moment of the day.
It is true that we need rest, especially during busy weeks. There’s plenty to be said about what is actually restful (I think most of us know that mindless scrolling on socials is not the best way to take a break), but I’d like to focus in this article on the spiritual impact of free time. I recently read a thought-provoking article called “The Witching Hour” by Kathleen Mulhern that discusses the challenge of keeping God in focus during the unstructured hours between work and sleep. Her article centers around the evening hours of a typical work day, but I think her points apply to any larger blocks of unstructured time we have throughout the day.
Many of us start the day with prayer or Bible time, and often end it that way, too. But what of those middle hours when we just want to let our guard down a little bit? Much like the homework that ends up getting pushed off, we are tempted during our free time to take a break from the constant effort of keeping God at the center of our lives. “After all, who can sustain twenty-four-hour godliness?” Mulhern asks. If we enter into free time with this mindset, invariably our breaks will stray into unhealthy or even detrimental habits that drive us far from the rest we seek. Letting our spiritual guard down may seem like a break in the moment, but in the end it only leads us further into the chaos of the world we are trying to escape. True rest, Jesus tells us, is coming to Him and laying our burdens at His feet.
As sinful people who find so many ways to resist the rest Jesus offers, how do we practically keep Him as the true focus of our free time? I found Mulhern’s definition of spiritual formation a helpful place to start. She defines spiritual disciplines as “a way of interrupting the daily rhythms that keep us too busy to remember God.” There’s no need to spend an hour of your break intensely studying Scripture. Simply “interrupt” your day by saying a short prayer or reading a verse of the day. As you enter into free hours, begin by praying about the things you’ve thought about or experienced during the day. If you have a long span of time in front of you, set a timer and pray when the timer goes off. The point is to shift your focus away from whatever distraction you have in front of you and bring God back to the center of your life.
Mulhern points out that we often see “spiritual discipline as work, a sort of spiritual productivity, not as the avenue of spiritual rest.” No wonder so many of us want to keep God out of free time, if it’s going to be so much work. But it doesn’t have to be – just start small, and focus on interrupting your daily habits with prayer and Scripture. We aren’t going to succeed at keeping God as the focus of our lives all the time, of course. But finding ways to bring Him into our unstructured hours can be a particular opportunity for us to grow in our faith. And thanks be to God, growing in our faith turns out to be one of the most restful things we can do. If we start with small ways of refocusing on God, eventually we may find ourselves desiring to come to Him first and receiving the rest He has to offer us.
The idea for this article came from Kathleen Mulhern’s article “The Witching Hour” in The Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2023 no. 37.
