rest.

I've decided that Spring Break is one of the best times of the year, because it gives those of us that never stop going a chance to come to a complete stop and re-coop. I don't know how I'm going to manage when I grow up and don't get a Spring Break. This week has been wonderful. I come home to sleep in my own plush, perfect bed, I can sleep until 9:30, I don't have anywhere pressing to be, I get to spend time with my family that I haven't gotten to see all semester, and I get to see Tyler beginning to bloom for spring.

Now, I know that at this very moment that every person that knows me is probably thinking, "Is she crazy? She rests probably the most out of any person I know!" It is true that I succumb to grandma bedtimes more often than I would care to admit and that my schedule allows me to take a nap almost every day, but that doesn't mean I have been resting.

By Spring Break, I was feeling extremely burnt out due to several things that have occurred this semester. Being home is like being in a sanctuary to me. It's a comforting place and somewhere where I can just breathe. I was reading in my Bible one night and found Psalms 62:5 which reads, "Find rest, O my soul, in God alone: my hope comes from him." It's simple and brief, but in those few words I knew the Lord was speaking straight to me. All semester I have struggled with different things that were out of my control entirely, frequently wondering what I had done to deserve being immersed in such seemingly unfair circumstances, and trying to overcome those things by retaliation or just simply ignoring them, hoping they would go away (which clearly wasn't working out for me). Through all of this and by coming home, I've realized it's really hard, yet essential, to rest in the Lord. It's hard to quit re-fueling the fire of frustration and let God permanently extinguish it. Emotional surrender is a very difficult thing to give to the Lord, which I am learning firsthand (and might I add, certainly not for the first time). It made me wonder how often as believers do we allow ourselves to stop and rest in the Lord in a world that's telling us to go full-throttle and worry about everything later? If so, when is later?

God gives us a peace unlike any other we can receive when we just stop and say, "I can't handle this anymore," and he immediately responds with, "But I can." Our God is a great god, because only He can take the heaviness of our hearts and make it weightless. That is what real rest is.