Come to Me

Summer is beginning, and with it the annual gap between how restful the season is supposed to be and how restful it actually is. I am not good at rest. I tend to fill the open hours, and I treat slowing down as something to get to once the list is finished, which it never is.

There is an invitation in Matthew I keep failing to accept. Jesus says to come to him, all who are weary and carrying heavy loads, and he will give rest. Then he says something I find stranger, that his yoke is easy and his burden light. A yoke is still a yoke. He is not promising no work. He is promising a different way of carrying it, beside him rather than alone, at a pace that does not break me.

I think a lot of my tiredness is self-inflicted. I take on more than I am asked to, and then I carry it as though everything depends on me alone. The offer in that passage is not a holiday from responsibility. It is a release from the lie that I have to hold it all up by myself.

This summer I want to actually take the rest that is offered rather than admiring it from a distance. I say that most summers. This one I would like to mean it.