Take the Day Off

FOREWORD BY MAX LUCADO

Sheep can’t sleep. Perhaps the reason we count sheep to help us sleep is because they are awake.

Sheep struggle to calm down. It’s understandable. They are defenseless. They have no sharp teeth or claws. They run slow. When they fall over, they struggle to stand up. They cannot protect themselves. Consequently, they are hesitant to relax.

For sheep to sleep, everything must be just right. No predators. No tension in the flock. No bugs in the air. No hunger in the belly. Everything has to be just so. Unfortunately the sheep cannot find safe pasture, nor can they spray insecticide, deal with the frictions, or find food. They need help. They need a shepherd to help them “lie down in green pastures” (Ps. 23:2). Without a shepherd, they can’t rest.

Without a shepherd, neither can we.

We work hard. There is money to be made. There are degrees to be earned. There are ladders to be climbed. Busyness is next to godliness. We idolize Thomas Edison who claimed he could exist on fifteen-minute naps. (Somehow we forget to mention Albert Einstein who averaged eleven hours of sleep a night.) In 1910 Americans slept 9 hours a night, today we sleep 7 and are proud of it. And we are tired because of it. Our minds are tired. Our bodies are tired. But much more importantly, our souls are tired.

We are eternal creatures and we ask eternal questions. From where did I come? To where am I going? What is right? What is wrong? When I’ve done wrong, how can I be made right? Do I have a Maker and does my Maker care about me? These are the primeval questions of the soul. And these are the kind of questions which, left unanswered, will steal our sleep.

Yet we are so busy making a living, we have no time to ponder the meaning of living.

Our Good Shepherd has a better idea. “He makes me to lie down” (Ps. 23:2). The One who leads us has a plan to restore us. That plan includes ordained moments of rest. That plan includes a Sabbath day.

It is time to rest. In this powerful, restorative book, Robert Morris calls us back to the ancient practice of regular renewal. I love Robert. He is a dear friend, generous with his wisdom and gracious with his leadership. God has given him a message for our generation. This book will bless you. Read it, then read it again.

A century ago Charles Spurgeon gave this advice to his preaching students:

The bow cannot always be bent without fear of breaking. For a field to bear fruit it must lie fallow. And for you to be healthy, you must rest. Slow down and God will heal you. He will bring rest to your mind, to your body, and most of all, to your soul. He will lead you to green pastures.

START HERE!

What does it take to reduce a grown man—the respected head of a large and rapidly growing enterprise with scores of employees, no less—to a weepy, bewildered, half-dressed heap on his closet floor? Surprisingly little, it turns out, under the right circumstances. “How little,” you ask? One morning several years ago, I discovered that nothing more challenging than an empty sock drawer was sufficient to push me over the edge.

That’s right. I am that man.

At the time, Gateway Church, the church in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area it is my privilege to pastor, had been in hyper-growth mode for years. We’d all pretty much been charging forward at a dead run from the day we founded the church with only a small group of friends in a living room, but me most of all. In the early days of any church startup, the founder is not only the preacher, but also the business manager, operations manager, personnel director, and the custodian.

Growth brought help and increased division of labor, but the pressures and demands expanded in parallel. A second Sunday morning service was added, followed by a Saturday night service. Then came more services on both days. Within a few years I found myself preaching five or six times each weekend and leading a large, seemingly ever-growing staff during the week.

At the same time, the increased profile of the church and some well-received books resulted in a steady stream of invitations to speak across North America and around the world. I felt obligated to say yes to as many of these as I could. “After all,” I reasoned, “surely the invitation wouldn’t have come my way if God didn’t want me to go help those people.” I presumed, often without asking, that every invitation was an expression of God’s favor and blessing. And that as a good steward, I was obligated to take on everything that came my way. Of course, I was also fully committed to being the best husband and father I could be. Indeed, my heart, value system, and biblical beliefs all demanded that I put family first. So, I had been striving mightily to live out that conviction. But I had been running on empty for years and it was finally catching up with me—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I wasn’t the only one in our household stretched increasingly thin. As the church grew, my wife Debbie found herself with more to do and more places to be. As it happens, my “hitting the wall” moment happened to coincide with her being out of town for a week at a women’s conference.

On one fateful morning in the middle of that week, I dragged myself out of bed early, my mind already whirling with the multitude of things I needed to accomplish that day, and the precious, limited time available for those tasks in between multiple meetings. Every item on my mental to-do list seemed important. So did the meetings that increasingly crowded my schedule. My practical instinct was to try to prioritize, but everything shouted with equal urgency. Everything seemed to vie for the label “Top Priority.”

After a quick shower, I headed to get dressed, opened my underwear drawer in the chest in my closet, and was greeted by a terrifying sight.

I was down to may last pair of clean underwear.

A surge of alarm hit me. What will I do tomorrow? There’s no more underwear!? As I pulled the last remaining pair on, I pulled myself together by assuring myself that I would figure something out later. After all, I had a whole twenty-four hours to solve this crisis.

Then I opened my sock drawer. My empty sock drawer.

I know it seems ridiculous, but that was it. That was the grain of sand that tipped the scales of my fragile physical and emotional well-being. That was the flimsy little hay straw that proved too much for the staggering camel. Sometimes after months of silent snowfall, a single snap of a twig is all it takes to trigger the avalanche that roars down the mountainside. The tiny issue of “no clean socks” was that twig snap. A wave of deep sadness washed over me. I dropped to the floor and began to weep.

Don’t judge me. I was perfectly capable of running a load of laundry. I was licensed and duly authorized by Debbie to operate our Maytag front loader. Or, alternatively, as a functioning adult in possession of a wallet containing cash, I was quite capable of stopping at Target or Walmart on the way to the office and purchasing socks and underwear with my own money. There were numerous easy solutions to this problem, but in that particular moment I was incapable of bringing any of them to my consciousness. Any solution, no matter how simple, constituted “one more thing to do.” My overburdened mind and under-rested soul were simply too weary to choose one. I was essentially frozen in fatigue.

Today I can laugh about the Great Underwear Crisis of 2005. It truly is absurd. I eventually pulled myself together, fished a matching (I think) pair of socks out of the dirty clothes hamper, and got on with my day. I was only lost in despair for a moment, but it was a frightening moment. So when I arrived at the office, I took the first opportunity I had to confide in our senior executive pastor, Tom Lane. Tom was and is a wise elder counselor and friend. He’d been supporting and serving senior pastors for about as long as I’d been a Christian. After describing my meltdown that morning, I finished with the question that had been haunting me all morning: “Tom, am I losing it?”

He smiled and said, “No, Robert, you’re just exhausted. You’ve been pushing too hard for too long. You just need some real, deep rest.” And he was right. I had become just another victim of the great silent epidemic of our times.

Epidemic is a strong word, but it’s the appropriate one here. Precisely one hundred years ago another kind of scourge was sweeping the world and killing millions. Between 1918 and 1920, roughly five hundred million people were infected by the Spanish Flu and somewhere between fifty million and one hundred million died around the world. In the United States, it’s estimated that 28 percent of the population eventually became infected and somewhere between 500,000 and 675,000 Americans died.

At the height of the epidemic, many Americans opened their morning paper each day and found two lists of names on the front page. The shorter of the two lists contained the names of local servicemen who had been killed in World War I. A longer list held the names of those who had died of the Spanish flu.

Thankfully, in the century since those terrifying days, science and technology have gone a long way toward eliminating those kinds of appalling death tolls by disease. But that progress has come at a price. The rise of modern technology has been a double-edged sword—accelerating the pace of life, extending our workdays, and breaking down the barriers between workplace and home.

All of the Western world experienced these changes, but America’s unique culture amplified them. We’re a nation built upon the ideas of freedom, individualism, and achievement. With God’s providential help, the founders created a dynamic place where class or station at birth meant almost nothing. Anyone willing to work hard, sacrifice, and apply themselves could achieve anything. The US became a magnet for the destitute and downtrodden of the world not because of its social welfare safety net. (There wasn’t one.) America became the promised land because a person could arrive penniless and through diligence, thrift, talent, and ambition become virtually anything they could imagine.

Yes, any person could go as far as their energy, creativity, and diligence could carry them. That’s the heart of the miraculous American dream. It’s a wondrous thing. But along the way during these last hundred years, we laid something aside that those previous generations of Americans understood and held sacred. Something that made living “the good life” possible. We’ll identify and explore that lost “something” in great detail on the pages that follow. For now, just know that its abandonment has unleashed another kind of epidemic across our land.

That’s right; today our culture of self-improvement and self-advancement through individual effort has resulted in tens of millions living burned-out, stressed-out lives. We’re never off and never unplugged. We’re never quiet. We’re never not bombarded by tasks, information, obligations, stimulations, and aggravations. And it’s taking an enormous toll on our well-being. It’s a plague of spirit, soul, and body exhaustion.

It’s not just us adults who are suffering the devastating effects of this twenty-first-century pandemic. Increasingly, even children are falling victim to our culture’s obsession with busyness. Shocking numbers of teens and preteens are overscheduled, overcommitted, and under rested. As a result, children too increasingly show all the signs of stress and burnout.

I’m not pointing fingers here. As I’ve already made clear, I too have fallen victim to the plague of our times. In fact, this epidemic came close to laying me low on more than one occasion before the Lord opened my eyes to the neglected, revolutionary spiritual key I will present to you on the pages that follow. I’m honored and excited to offer you the biblical cure that saved me.

About a quarter century ago, a Christian family physician from Wisconsin named Richard Swenson wrote a timely and insightful book prompted by the steady stream of stressed-out, worn out, burned-out people he kept treating in his office week after week. In Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, Dr. Swenson diagnosed a single root of much of the sickness and physical breakdown he was being asked to treat in his medical practice. That diagnosis? Too many people living with too little in their lives of something he called “margin.” He said most of us are living “marginless” lives. What did Dr. Swenson mean by this? He opened his book by contrasting living with margin to living without it:

Think about this: If marginless living—and the physical, mental, emotional, and financial toll that comes with it—was a significant problem back in the midnineties, it is surely far, far worse today. Dr. Swenson’s book was published back when email and the internet were only embryonic novelties, phones were “mobile” but not “smart,” and the future founders of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were all prepubescent kids in their bedrooms playing Super Mario Kart on Super Nintendo game consoles. The dizzying technological changes that have emerged over the last two decades have served only to crowd, hurry, and busy our lives even more. Today, a wide range of authorities are sounding the alarm about both the physical and mental toll our epidemic of marginlessness is taking on us as a people.

On the medical front for example, a 2017 piece for CNN titled “Stress Really Is Killing Us” reported, “Stress-related disorders and diseases have been on the rise in the whole population for decades, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”² Along the same lines, a 2016 study measured what it called the “physiological stress load” of Americans of all races and income levels. It found that health indicators tied to heart, kidney, and liver disease were closely tied to levels of stress. It also found that the stress load of the average American has been rapidly increasing since the late 1970s.³ According to one expert on balancing work and life, “Stress is a factor in five out of the six leading causes of death—heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory disease, and accidents. An estimated 75 percent to 90 percent of all doctor visits are for stress-related issues.”⁴

Our increasing lack of margin is damaging more than our bodies, however. As I discovered the hard way, it ravages our minds and emotions as well. A respected online source for mental health information lists the following as possible warning signs of burnout or emotional exhaustion:⁵

Currently, millions upon millions of people in our culture are living daily with these symptoms. Far too many of them are believers. Christian counselor David Murray, author of the book Reset: Living a Grace-Paced Life in a Burnout Culture, says we’re experiencing “an epidemic of burnout” in the Church.⁶ It’s certainly true among my fellow pastors. The words “burnout” and “ministry” have become tightly linked.

For many Americans and their doctors, the path to relieving the negative effects of exhaustion and stress seemingly runs through the local pharmacy. A 2013 study revealed that one in every six adult Americans was on some sort of prescribed psychiatric drug like an antianxiety or antidepressant medication.⁷ Some unknown but very large percentage of the individuals taking these medications are likely suffering either the physical or psychological effects of living without margin. They’re simply chronically under rested.

The physical, emotional, and mental impacts are troubling enough for any individual. But when you add up the costs across our entire society, it begins to look like a crisis. A 2016 article in Forbes magazine attempted to put a price tag on the damage to our economy. The piece cited a study that estimated that “as many as one million people per day miss work because of stress.” The cost of this lost productivity was estimated to be between $150 billion and $300 billion annually for American employers.⁸

I know exhaustion certainly represented a crisis for me, as it will for you or someone you love.

So, is there an answer? Is there a cure for this epidemic? I’m happy to report there is. Like most other solutions that actually work, we’ll find that it’s been hiding in plain sight all along—in our Bibles.