346. Rest as a Practice, Not a Luxury

"You're allowed to stop."

In this conversation, I explore rest not as a luxury or reward, but as a sacred practice woven into the very heart of creation. We dive a little deeper into Dr. Arianna Molloy's book, "Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work."

If God rested, why is it so hard for us?

We'll discuss the pressures that drive us to perform and strive, the stories we've inherited about productivity and worth, and what it means to honor our humanity by slowing down. 

This is an invitation to step into living a life from a place of rest, not when everything is done, but right now, right where you are.

Order Dr. Arianna Molloy's Book: Healthy Calling
Visit Taylor University's Center for Scripture Engagement
Read Hebrews 4:9-11: biblegateway.com

Listen to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith on E. 93: REST
Listen to Eryn Lynum on E. 318: REST
Listen to E. 273: Nurturing the Soul with Forest Bathing
Listen to Asheritah Ciuciu on E. 183: Everyday Prayers of Rest
Listen to Asheritah Ciuciu on E. 182: Everyday Prayers of Rest
Listen to E. 14 with Janell: REST: Collecting Strength

Chapters

• 0:06 Reimagining Motherhood And Matriarchy
• 1:55 Theme: The Spiritual Practice Of Rest
• 3:36 Healthy Humility And Routine Rest
• 6:10 Sabbath As Surrender And Trust
• 7:23 Hebrews 4: Entering A Noun Called Rest
• 9:46 Calming The Winds: Word Study Insights
• 11:40 Animated Lives And Learning Equilibrium
• 13:17 Effort To Enter Rest: Tension And Hope
• 15:12 Stillness, Silence, And Family Rhythms
• 17:05 Practical Sabbath Rhythms And Joy
• 18:44 The Prayer Of Examen: Five Steps
• 21:11 Scripture Engagement For Lasting Growth
• 24:09 Practices: Pray, Picture, Journal, Contemplate
• 27:06 Community Storying And Memorizing Scripture
• 28:41 Guided Reflection On Weakness And Surrender
• 30:51 Closing Prayer And Community Invitations

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

As I've listened to the stories of thousands of women of all ages, in all kinds of stages through the years, I've kept their stories locked in the vault of my heart. I feel as if they've been walking around with me all through these years. They've bothered me, they've prodded me, and sometimes kept me up at night. Ultimately, they've increased my passion to reframe and reimagine the powerful positions of mother and matriarch within the family system. I'm a problem solver, so I set out to find a way to perhaps change the trajectory of this silent and sad scenario about a dynamic yet untapped source of potential and purpose, sitting in our homes and churches. It is time to come to the table, heartlifters, and unleash the power of maternal presence into the world. Welcome to Mothering for the Ages, our 2025 theme here on today's Heartlift. I'm Janelle. I am your guide here on this heartlifting journey. I invite you to grab a pen, a journal, and a cup of something really delicious. May today's conversation give you clarity, courage, and a revived sense of camaraderie. You see, you're not on this journey alone. We are unified as heartlifters and committed to bringing change into the world. One heart at a time. Hello, Heartlifter, and welcome to today's Heartlift with Janelle. I'm Janelle, your host for today's remarkable conversation on the spiritual practice of rest. Rest has been a strong theme in decades of my teaching, my work, my study, my research, my writing. No matter what book you pick up of mine, you will find some reference and some study on rest. But today we are going to be diving into Dr. Ariana Malloy's chapter, Healthy Humility, where she talks about resting on a routine basis. As promised, I'm slowing things down. I am moving at a much slower personal pace, which is leading and guiding me to a much slower vocational pace. And so I wanted to take more time on the podcast for teaching. I am a teacher. It is what I do, who I am, it's the breath that God breathed into me was to teach. And when I read things, I want to share. So today we're reading from Healthy Humility in Dr. Ariana Malloy's book, Healthy Calling. Resting on a Routine Basis. This leads us to the third part of true humility. Last week we talked about her three keys of healthy humility, with the final one being knowing how to take a break. This is far more essential than you know. Walking humbly with God means vigilant vigil. Oh goodness, I can do this. Walking humbly with God means vigilant vigilantly. Wow, guarding and incorporating routine times of rest. This is one of those areas where it's easier to nod our heads and say, oh sure, definitely, than it is to actually do. It's much harder than we realize to let go. Press pause and walk away from the tyranny of the urgent for a set time. I add here, this really is my life calling. We have been talking about healthy calling, the three aspects of that, knowing the caller, capital C, spending time with the caller, we being the called, little C, keeping that in the proper relationship, and then community, that our calling, our personal calling, will be felt and will be given to community. It is for the advancement of the kingdom of God, as I like to say. She continues, here's what I mean. Healthy humility recognizes that to function at our best means we need to rest. And Ariana and I talked about this. I really feel from all the decades of my understanding and all the interviews and conversations we've had here on the podcast, I will put those in our show notes so you can revisit them. On rest, you can tell it's a big theme because I have lots of conversations with great authors and amazing thought leaders, spiritual direction uh leaders on what it means to rest. And I want to add that I really do believe it means moving through life from a place of rest. Yes, we need to get rest. And as I wrote about in Overcoming Hurtful Words, Stronger Every Day, the rest that I talked about in those books was recovery. It meant to recover. Many times in the scripture, Christ tells us to rest, and that means to recover, to gain strength, to add to our strength tank. And that is what rest really is. It just means that we are, we're filled with Christ. We're filled with, as we're going to talk about today, engaging with scripture. And so she writes: here's what I mean: healthy humility recognizes that to function at our best means we need to rest. We are not the God little g of our universe. Life will go on if we step away and rest. Taking time to Sabbath means surrendering control to God. I'm going to repeat that. Taking time to Sabbath means surrendering control to God. Choosing intentional times of rest means trusting the author of time, capital A, capital T, by tithing our time to him. Check this out. She guides us to Hebrews four, verses nine through eleven, which tells us there remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. It's a noun. And so entering into a Sabbath rest, that's a thing. That is a noun, a person, place, or thing. It's a noun, not a verb. So it is a state. And when we read the definition, it is the perpetual, the perpetual Sabbath rest to be enjoyed uninterruptedly by believers in their fellowship with the Father and Son, in contrast to the weekly Sabbath under the law. So this Sabbath rest, and you can read all of Hebrews 4 to get some background. This is a gift from God. It is something He says, I I want to gift you to be able, here's this place, right, that I'm talking about. This place called Sabbath rest that I want you to perpetually, uninterruptedly live from. I got out of it. Wow, that's where the grace comes, right? So there remains then a Sabbath rest, a literal state, a place, a thing that God gifts to us so that we can always, perpetually, without interruption, live in that state. Well, heartlifter, I want to live in that state. I'm raising my hand and I want to live in that state. I don't ever ooh, this is big. Ever want to get out of that state of attunement and alignment ever again in my life. Ever. I don't ever want to end up there again. Okay. So we'll keep talking and I will give some hope for some practices. That's what today is about. A spiritual practice of rest. As that scripture continues, it says, okay, there remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. That's you and that's me. I consider myself a people of God, a person who follows God. For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works just as God did from his. Those two rest are a different interpretation. They come from the Greek called kataposis. I know I'm not saying them right, please. Which means actually a calming of the winds. Wow. A calming of the winds. Once again, it's a noun. Anyone who enters God's calming of the winds, gods causing something to cease. It also can be a cessation or absence of activity, movement, or animation.

unknown: 16:38

What?

SPEAKER_00: 16:40

Oh my gosh. When I read this, number one, I just love the calming of the winds. But it also means that anyone who enters God's rest also stops, cessates. That's just what cessation means. A stopping. A stopping or an absence of activity, movement, or animation. I am such an animated person. And one thing that I have been saying during this whole entire movement in my life, these last going on four months now of enforced rest is when I get really animated, like when I'm teaching, when I am worshiping, when I am with my grands that I love, when I'm with my friends that I love. I'm just in life in general, I get very animated. And when I get very animated, I'm gonna just check my little watch right now. And when I get very animated, it usually says relax. High stress. It'll give me those orange bars on my watch. And it will tell me to relax, do some breathing exercises. I know. And so I've been wrestling with that. Like, Lord, will I never be able to be me? I feel like that's who you created me to be, is this animated person. And I love teaching. And when I teach, I get fired up and passionate. But right now in my life, God is saying, I want you to calm down. Have you ever been there? Please tell me you understand. You know, and sometimes it's pretty interesting in the scriptures that there are those that God will say, now is your time to rise up, you know, and typically it's someone hiding under a tree like Gideon. And he's like, I can't do what you're telling me to do. So there's always this tension, right? We hold in one hand and the other. But for right now, for me anyway, God is inviting me to learn an equilibrium. There it is. I was trying to get there. To learn this balance. As the scripture closes, it says, Let us therefore make every effort. There's that word again. And effort means exertion. So there is effort involved here to enter that rest. It's not something that is, well, at least in my experience, you may have your own experience for sure. And I love for you to share that experience. We have to exert some effort in order to enter this beautiful Sabbath rest, the rest of God Himself. Its full fruition is yet future, right? Though believers now enter into it. In whatever way we enter into divine rest, that which they enjoy is involved in an indissoluble relationship with God. The enter here comes from the Greek word isharmi. I I know I'm not saying that correct. And it's a verb, again, it's a verb, and it means to go in or come out an entrance into any condition or state of things. So we have here in these short two verses, Hebrews 4, 9 through 11, a mix of action, discipline, effort. But that effort is going into a state. Does that make sense? There remains then a Sabbath rest. That's the thing, that place, that's a state of being. But we have to put forth some effort to enter into that state. Well, how do we do that? Well, Ariana is helping us. She's giving us a great deal of help in her book, Healthy Calling. Both of my books, I promise, actually, all three of my books, talk a lot about how to enter into stillness and solitude. That is in Rock Solid Families, my oldest book. I wrote about it before I knew anything. I honestly, all I knew to do was, I think I need to implement a 30-minute practice of silence in my homeschooling life of my children. So for every day, we would have 30 minutes of silence when they were old enough to be in their rooms, in their spaces. So I write a lot about order, organization, stillness, silence in rock solid and overcoming hurtful words. I enter into recovery, recovering your strength when you've been exhausted. And then in Stronger Every Day, I just give you so many practical tools on how to do that. So, yes, consider that a commercial. You know, I don't like commercials, but I've just written a lot about it, and I want you to understand that's why I do what I do. So Ariana continues and she gives us an example from her own life, which I love about her writing. Earlier, I shared that I've come from a recent season in life that was exceptionally hard. Every week I found myself practically crawling on my hands and knees toward the Sabbath. My family and I Sabbath together on Saturdays, she, her husband, and her son. It's not easy, but it's always worth it. Now, Erin Lynham, in her book, The Nature of Rest, really writes this out for us, and you can re-listen to her podcast uh conversation with us. Inevitably, every time Sabbath arrives, my mind gets flooded with work I should do, things I can control. But making the effort to Sabbath releases me from the seductive lure of workaholism and pride. It helps me see that in the midst of all of these hard situations, God has been faithful. And my surrender is part of that process. She continues. Ruth Haley Barton, spiritual director and co-founder of the Transforming Center, reminds us rhythms must be intentionally formed. They don't happen by coincidence. That's why Hebrews, right? That's what we just read in Hebrews 4. Make every effort.

unknown: 23:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 23:49

It's really speaking to me today. They don't happen by coincidence. Sabbath creates a rhythm for humility to enter in. Ariana writes, for my family, part of our Sabbath rhythm includes Sabbath pancakes, love that, intentional prayer time. We might add other things like a run along the beach. See the depth and the width of how you can celebrate a Sabbath. They go for a hike in the mountains. They live in the beautiful state of California, or some fun, life-giving activity. It's alive. It's not what we have in our minds, at least in my mind, is a pious, no talking, be quiet, no fun. No, a Sabbath is where we enter, therefore, into the rest, rejuvenation, the playful nature of a living, breathing God who wants to commune with us. Regardless, we have our pancakes and our prayer time. So she says, when I was thinking about how to make Sabbath prayer time a little different, a little more focused, one of my mentors suggested a particular meditative prayer called the prayer of examine. We talk about Ignatius's prayer of examine quite a bit here, but I love the way that Ariana teaches it. I also teach it in Stronger Everyday. And I will put all these links there for you so you can click, click, click and begin to enter into this Sabbath rest that God has for you. There are five steps to the prayer of examine. Here we go. Ask God to bless you with graced understanding. Pray, Lord, help me. Help me make sense of what's going on. I have prayed that prayer so many times these past few months. Please help me understand what's going on. Oh caller, capital C, right? Open my eyes, my ears, my mind, and help me understand. Two, you review the day in thankfulness, gratitude. Three, you notice the feelings that surface when you get quiet. This is the more difficult part that you have to practice over and over again. Like Ariana said, when you start to practice solitude and silence and stillness, a million thoughts will flood your mind, and you just have to let them in, say hello, how are you doing? I'll come back to you later. Right now I need to focus. I need to focus. Choose one of those feelings and pray from it. So maybe one of those feelings that surface is distress. Maybe you are in distress over a situation. I hear you distress, I feel you. I really personify feelings and emotions. You know, I do. I invite them to come sit down next to me. And I make space for them. And the more personal that I make them, the less scary they get for me. So then, five is to look toward tomorrow and conclude with the Lord's Prayer. I love the familiarity of the Lord's Prayer because most of us know it by rote. It's in our bones, I hope. If not, that's okay. Print it out. Read it from the scripture. Remember, she writes, this can take five minutes or 30. It can be done alone or with someone else. However, you choose to approach it, it's worth it. I do a daily exam. You can do a weekly examin. You can do a monthly exam. Doing it on a daily basis, five or ten minutes, really helps keep, as Paul writes a lot about the record of wrongs in life. It keeps that flowing beautifully. It keeps the practice of forgiveness we've talked a lot about here, living in a forgiving mode. It keeps the accounts in our life a lot shorter so that we can close some of those accounts out at the end of the day and not carry them into the next day. Sabbath helps us examine where our strengths are and take time to thank God. When we take time to reflect rather than skim social media, when we take time to do that, when we take time to reflect rather than binge-watch a show, I'm so guilty of this. When we take time to reflect rather than keep ourselves so very busy, it gives us an opportunity to cultivate a heart of humility. So that's why we dial down the noise and we make every effort to come into a time of rest so we can examine where our weaknesses are and invite the Lord's strength. We can examine where we felt like a failure and choose to learn from it and keep on going. She writes, like Dory in Finding Nemo, we just keep swimming, keep swimming, keep swimming. We can just add, keep praying, keep practicing, keep being still. But Sabbath is the practice of the humble. I really love that. It isn't easy to do. There's always a reason to post. Postpone it. It's often uncomfortable because we live in a culture that thrives on busy being busy. But it's always, always, always worth the stop. So, in closing, I wanted to bring to our conversation today, as I promised last week, going through some new processes here. That here we are going to talk about a new spiritual practice, perhaps, or one that you've been doing for a while. But today's practice is the spiritual practice of rest, of entering into God's Sabbath rest for us so that we can live our lives from a tank, an emotional, spiritual, relational, physical tank that is not running on empty, but is actually running on stored up rest and strength that we're we're constantly recovering. We're in a constant state of recovering and gaining, garnering, cultivating rest and strength. So this is gonna be completely new for me. This is something I've tried in the past, uh, but it doesn't last. This time for me, it's gonna be a lasting effect of my relationship with God in Jesus' name. That is a really good affirmation for me. So I happen to find on Bible Gateway this really cool way of practicing rest, which is called scripture engagement. It comes from this the Abide Bible Initiative and Taylor University Center for Scriptural Engagement. I was so happy to find Taylor University Center for Spiritual Engagement. I'll put that link in there for you to just download all the things I did. So I'm just gonna do a very fast little synopsis. Scripture engagement, what is it? Ask many Christians of different ages and spiritual maturity levels what they believe is the best way to grow as a Christian. And the most common answer you'll get is pray and read the Bible. That's a good answer. A maturing Christian continually, there's that. Remember that Sabbath rest is a perpetual, uninterrupted state of being.

unknown: 32:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 32:27

So we want to continually, perpetually be growing in our faith, hope, and our love for God and others. That's our mandate. So we know that praying, reading scripture is so important. In the book Move, one what 1,000 churches reveal about spiritual growth. I love this. Authors Hawkins and Parkinson describe research conducted on 250,000 people at 1,000 churches. The study looked at 50 different factors that impact spiritual growth, defined as loving God and loving others. Their findings? Nothing, no thing has a greater impact on spiritual growth than reflection on scripture. If churches could do only one thing to help people at all levels of spiritual maturity grow in their relationship with Christ, their choice is clear. They would inspire, encourage, and equip their people to read the Bible, specifically, though, to reflect on scripture for meaning in their lives. So that's application, right? The Bible is the most powerful catalyst for spiritual growth. I'm gonna go down agreeing with that one million percent after a lifetime, basically, but 13 very defined years where I was intentionally sitting across from mostly churched people, women particularly, who had spent 20, 30 years following God. I know a lot of theories, I know a lot of practices, I know a lot of coaching skills, I know a lot of personal growth skills, but at the end of the day, scripture when it's applied to your life, it is active and living, it will break strongholds, it will lift you up, it will help you gain what we know as a strong sense of self, incredible behavior patterns, and really clear, beautiful ways of communicating. That is a good promise. The Bible's power to advance spiritual growth is unrivaled by anything else we've discovered. That is from that very incredible study that they did. 250,000 people at a thousand churches. So why are the scriptures so vital to spiritual growth? Well, I just said they're living, they're active, they give freedom, they make truth known to us, and they equip us for service. All this and more is true, but perhaps the most important reason is based on the simple description that the Bible is God's word to us. To encounter the words of scripture is to encounter God in action. Okay, so spiritual engagement is interaction back and forth with Bible text in a way that provides sufficient opportunity for the text to speak for itself by the power of the Holy Spirit, enabling readers and listeners to hear God's voice and discover for themselves the unique claim Jesus Christ is making upon us. So reading the scripture, chewing it up like a cow, that's what meditation means. Cows have five stomachs. They eat, they regurgitate, they eat, they regurgitate. Meditation is just reading the word, thinking about the word. I like to write the word because that does something in the brain when you write it, so that involves journaling. It doesn't have to be long, but when we write something, it does something in our brain and it helps it grab onto us. So you can read more of that. I will put the link and then defining scripture engagement. We just did that. And last but not least is some practices that you can do, which is why we're here today. Pray the scripture, picture it, that's Lexio Divina. Picture it is also Lexio Imago, where you can look at pictures. Uh, many Bibles have illustrations. Journal the scripture, which I just talked about. A scripture journal is a conversation with God. It is meant to be a place where you can safely record and reflect on your raw thoughts and feelings, ask big questions, search for patterns. I do that quite a bit. As I just said when we began our conversation today, a huge pattern in my life is my inability to be able to truly live from a place of rest. My nervous system has been activated since the embryo, I know. And so it has been something that I have really searched for patterns in my life to help me grow and become all that God really wants me to be. Because, you know, at the end of the day, as I rode in stronger, God wants us to live a eudaimious life, a life filled with flow, a life filled with meaning, with rich relationships, remarkable families. Yeah, he does. That's his goal, that's his joy. It's what he wants for us. That's his Sabbath rest. Engage through art, something I really love to do. I just cut out a picture today and put it in my journal. And then contemplate. Contemplating a passage of scripture is a long-standing practice in the church. I just said it's called Lectio Divina, Latin for sacred reading. The four traditional stages of contemplation are reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. And they are designed to provide structure and guidance for us so that we can learn how to perform God's word, how to practice it. It's best practice with passages that you have at least at least some familiarity with. It is not intended to introduce you to something new in the Bible. I love that. I've never heard that distinction, but I think it's really true. The purpose of contemplating scripture is to allow you to experience it and reflect more deeply on what you know. They go on to say storying scripture. So a teacher will tell a Bible story to a group of people, and then the listeners retell that story back to the teacher. So you could do that at your dinner table. You could do that with a friend. Hey, listen, let's read this scripture together. I'm gonna give you a story about how it worked in my life. Why don't you give me a story and how that worked in your life? What a great coffee conversation. Speaking scripture, we're wired to speak, memorizing scripture, hand copying, which I just said, and then manuscript Bible study method is a small group scripture engagement practice that's been around for 60 years. I've never heard of it. People gather together to observe a passage where they see more details as a community than they would as individuals. I love that. So I want to end with a meditative exercise from Ariana's book. And this is from her chapter on healthy humility, her guiding question number two. Recall the first attribute of humility. Being aware of your strengths and weaknesses, but not distracted by either one. What's an area where you currently feel weak? An area where you feel lacking, and possibly even overly aware of your own faults. Maybe this area of weakness is becoming an all-consuming thing. You don't need to stay in that place. Invite God into that weakness right now. Try saying, Father, I need your help. Oh, I need your help. I need your help in this specific area. Help me learn how to enter into your Sabbath rest. Try saying it a few times, not because God needs to hear it more than once, but because you do. Ask the Lord to fill the gaps for you. You can trust that He will. And here's Ariana's orienting prayer. Lord Jesus, thank you for being the best teacher. Thank you for wanting me to learn. Thank you for being patient with me as I keep learning. Please forgive me for any area of my life where I have been trying to take control or idolize success over growth. I want to walk with you. I want to learn the rhythms of your grace. Show me what it means to keep learning in this season. I want to rest in you. Protect me from distraction as I seek to rest. Show me how to rest well in you. You are my caller, and my calling is yours to do with what you will. I surrender to you.

unknown: 42:10

Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 42:13

Thanks for listening today, Heartlifter. Be sure to hop over to Substack at Heartlift Central, Instagram at JanelleRarden, and if you would be so kind, make a tax-deductible donation to keep this podcast ad-free and spreading its influence all over the world. You can make that donation on my website, JanelleRarden.com, Heartlift International. Everything you need to know is right there. Remember, Heartlifter, you have value, worth, and dignity,