I remember the thrill that I felt as a kid because of the approaching summer, and I still get that feeling a little bit.  I used to anticipate hours of bike-riding and ball-playing. Now that my life is no longer measured in semesters, I still enjoy the slower pace of the summer.

Summer’s are good times for vacations, going swimming, and simply taking a rest when the opportunity presents itself.  Our summer calendars usually have fewer after-work commitments than we find in other seasons.  We are trying to enjoy the rest and freedom those evenings will provide.

However, I know that when we take a rest from our ordinary schedules, many of us are prone to feel guilty.  We feel like we are supposed to be busy in order to be productive; we need to be active to feel significant.  On the other hand, we can also feel like we do our work in order to get to the weekend; we endure the other months so that we can enjoy the Summer. 

“Feeling guilty about rest” and “Living for the weekend” are not the only options that are available to us to characterize how we think about work and rest.  The command in the Bible is, “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest.”  From the beginning, we were made to do both things, work and rest.  This command about working for six days and resting one shows us that God places a high value on work and on rest; that means that we should be able to enjoy both work and rest.

I know that some will say, “How can I enjoy work?  I try to avoid it all cost.”  Others will say, “I’d love to rest, but you don’t know how much I have to do.  I just can’t rest.”  We have to remind ourselves (I need this reminder constantly) that what makes work enjoyable is the offering of our work to God as worship.  He takes delight in our work and that makes our work significant.  Similarly, we take a rest believing that God is caring for us; that what we cannot get to in our six days, God will take care of for us.  Believing these things about work will not remove all the frustrations, but they will give our work a quality that fosters endurance for those frustrations.  Believing these things about rest will allow us to see those free evenings when they come as gifts from God to be enjoyed freely.  I hope you get some rest this summer, and I hope you get some things done too.