My friend,

Take a minute…really. Take a deep breath.

The last couple of months each year are often full of hustle and bustle.

For me, preaching for different churches, discipleship meetings, speaking at men’s retreats, teaching online to counseling ministries or elder groups, discipleship strategies with a church or two for the coming year, several guests needing a little refuge (from Covid, or work stress, or help with child care and many other other things), and lots of holiday rested ministry as well as social engagements with friends and family. Great connections, fellowship, and ministry, but always BIZZY!

This holiday season certainly hasn’t been bad at all, even fun in lots of ways, but it’s been a bit of a blur. And not over – travel, kid care, end-of-year financial management for two non-profits and several missions workers with MQD Ministries still remain. I bet with holidays and the state of the world you know exactly the feeling – hustle!

You know, there’s NOT a lot of “buck up and get it done” in Scripture. Instead, knowing the human condition is often full of striving and perpetually falling short of our desires for ourselves, much less the glory of God. Scripture doesn’t prescribe more hustle, but instead prescribed more hushed attentiveness, more coming-to-Jesus-to-rest moments. Sounds good to me!

God wouldn’t have you be lazy, but He certainly isn’t wanting you to have a “gotta make it happen” attitude about the season of which the angels proclaim “peace in earth”. That really was not code for “step up and get more done!”

Right now, God is doing what He does – sharing His love and peace and joy and rest, and if we are available we get to participate. That’ll require a lot of our weakness meeting a whole lot of His strength, but what it won’t require is you pulling yourself up by soulical boot straps and “doing what it takes”.

If nothing else, grace means: If you could do what’s necessary, Christ didn’t have to; if He has done what’s necessary, then you don’t have to. The very real alternative to walking according to a “get ‘er done” fleshiness is a walk with God as your enoughness in restfulness. That is the life by grace. His life made yours, by grace. And it means rest for weary souls. Yours. Mine.

He did it. We receive it. Sometimes, we even remember to rest in it.

Walking in grace isn’t less responsible, but more Christ-confident; never less busy, but always more dependent.

This season, accept the responsibilities He brings you by faith. Don’t “step up to the task” to get it all done, but instead “step out in faith” to know Him as He does what He calls you to.

So in my hustle this week, I am reminded amidst the tumult of Christmas shoppers and traffic and overworked employees, and everything else that has forever knit “hectic” to ‘holidays” in our vernacular, to breathe. Try it. Just…. Breathe.

God’s Spirit invited me to rest. To follow and focus on Christ and His Life. To know the Peace that is Jesus Himself. Imagine that: knowing Him AS peace.

Jesus is our one and only Sabbatical of the Soul. Jesus is the rest.

“Let’s embrace

a little more

hush than

hustle, a little

more Christ

than chaos, this

Christmas”

@MikeQDaniel

With a focus on Him and heart available to His constant impression, even amidst the chaos surrounding this season, I’m convinced we get to know the heart of Christ at the center of Christmas, and more importantly, the heart of each of us on whom His favor really does, well… rest.

ridiculously graced…

-mike.