Working at Resting

My company has a "use it or lose it" policy when it comes to vacation: you can't carry your days into the next year, because the point of vacation is to take it and not to bank it.  With my work anniversary coming up, I have a day or two unused so have to use it or else I will lose it.  Looking ahead at this a few weeks back, I had feared I wouldn't be able to extricate myself from meetings and deadlines, but that doesn't seem to be the problem now.  My problem now seems to be that I have forgotten how to rest.

You know you're busy when, if given the opportunity to rest, you don't know what to do with yourself.  Meaning that you've run yourself so ragged that you no longer remember how to rest.  This is bad for someone who believes in the importance of and mandate to rest, as deemed by my God, who Himself rested on the seventh day after creating the whole world.  He invites us into that rest, as a way of being like Him, recharging (unlike Him, we grow weary and need to take breaks), and trusting in His provision (that work that looms over our heads, we'll just have to believe it can wait for a moment). 

Between deadlines at work, getting ready for the class I'm teaching starting next week, and responsibilities on the kid and home front, I've been spinning my plates frantically, with hardly a moment to catch my breath.  So it would seem that a day or so to be still would be welcomed.  And yet here I am treating this blessing in the same way I have treated the rest of my life: with an eye to efficiently maximizing the time.  As in, how can I best rest?

It seems absurd to think this way, and it is.  Perhaps this is part of the discipline of resting: to be confronted with our inability to be still and trust our God in the stillness.  Absent actually doing it, we can lose touch with how to do it; but having the regular practice of doing it reminds us of this important spiritual barometer.  I am failing in this area, but thankful for the opportunity to measure myself and realize this.  Let's hope I rest well, whatever that means.