Rest Is Not a Place

Gone Hiking is a recurring series at The Compass. The trail is the classroom. The pace is the point.

Tuesday’s Compass | Gone Hiking | Tuesday, June 9

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "Gone Hiking" is one of its recurring series. Every Tuesday it ventures into the practices, the disciplines, and the tracks left by those who traveled before us into a deeper life with God. Most of them walked terrain that contemporary Christianity has largely forgotten. This series is a guide to finding it again. The trail is always worth the walk.

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Last week I wrote about the bone-tired people who’ve been coming to Stillpoint. I’ve been on the road since then, which gives you a different angle on the same question.

You leave the quiet place and walk back into the noise, and you find out pretty quickly what you were actually carrying.

* * *

Stillpoint is six acres of Montana wilderness. Pines. Ridge. Morning light that does something to you if you let it. When guests arrive, I’ve watched them look around and exhale. I’ve watched them settle into an adirondonack chair at the firepit and fall asleep. Something in the setting does its work before I say a word.

For a while I thought that was the gift. The place. The address. And, in some ways, it is.

But I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that you can move someone to a beautiful location and not touch the thing that’s actually tired. The noise they carried in will still be running, quieter maybe, but running. And in a few days they’ll drive back out the same road and the weight will be waiting for them at the junction.

A place can create conditions for rest. It cannot give rest. That comes from somewhere else.

* * *

The leaders who come here are carrying what many call the hurry virus. It’s not surprising they’ve been infected as it is in the air of our culture and highly contagious. It got into them gradually, the way most things do. One more meeting. One more urgent request. One more thing that only they can handle. And somewhere in the accumulation of all those urgent things, they stopped knowing what rest felt like. Not just rest from activity. Rest in themselves.

What they need isn’t a vacation from their life. They need to encounter something that reorders what they believe about their life. About what God actually requires of them. About whether the work will hold together if they stop holding it together by sheer force of will.

That’s not a scenery problem. That’s a formation problem.

* * *

Which brings me to the thing I’ve been sitting with on this trip.

I can offer rest from this address. Stillpoint is real. The quiet is real. The pines and the ridge and the morning light are genuinely doing something. But if I’m going to offer rest to exhausted people, I have to offer it from inside myself, not just from the property description.

I have to be a person who has actually found it. Not perfectly. Not all the time. But actually, in some real way that the tired ones can sense when they sit down across from me.

You can feel the difference. Everyone can. When someone offers you rest from a place of their own restlessness, you leave more tired than when you came. When someone offers it from somewhere deep and settled in themselves, something in you slows down just from being near them.

* * *

Jesus said come to me and I will give you rest. He didn’t say come to my location. He said come to me.

That’s still the only offer that actually delivers.

I want to be someone who has been to him often enough that a little of it comes through when the bone-tired ones sit down at my table. That’s the formation work underneath the retreat work. That’s what inward-out simplicity is actually pointing toward.

Not a cleaner garage. Not a quieter schedule. A quieter self.

I’m still learning what that costs. But I think I’m finally clear on what it is.

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Gratefully,

— Gene

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