The Walk That Became A Route

It used to be a walk.

That is a sentence she would have found ridiculous five years ago, because it is still a walk. She still goes. Same hill, most mornings, and if anything she goes more often than she used to.

But it used to be a walk.

Now it is a route. Four point two miles, and she knows what it should take her, and if it takes longer she knows why, and there is a small thing in her that notices. She goes at a pace. She has the right shoes for it. There is a figure on her wrist at the end and she looks at it, every time, and she would tell you she does not care about the figure, which is true and is also not the whole truth.

She has not stopped on that hill in about two years.

That is the thing she noticed a fortnight ago, at the stile, where she used to sit.

There is a stile about two thirds of the way round with a view of the whole valley, and there was a period of her life when she sat on it for ten minutes most mornings and did absolutely nothing.

She goes over it now without breaking stride.

And she is not sure when that changed, and she is fairly sure nobody suggested it, and the walk that was the one thing in her week that was not for anything has quietly become another thing that is for something.

If your one restful thing has developed a target, come and sit on this stile a minute. Nobody is going to measure anything.

He makes him lie down, and nothing is being achieved

There is a line in the shepherd psalm that is so familiar people stop seeing what is actually happening in it.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.Psalm 23:2

Look at what the sheep is doing. Lying down. That is the whole activity, and it is not a preparation for anything and nothing is being produced by it.

And look at who is responsible. He maketh me. The sheep is not congratulated for good judgment about rest. The lying down is arranged for it by somebody who could see it needed doing before it did.

Shepherds will tell you a sheep only lies down when it is not afraid, not hungry, and not being pestered. So the picture is not a well disciplined animal. It is an animal that has been made safe enough to stop, by somebody else, on purpose.

You are being made to lie down rather than instructed to, and the arranging is not yours. Psalm 23:2 puts the making on the shepherd's side and gives the sheep nothing to achieve, and it is the Holy Spirit who leads a person into that in practice, which means the rest on offer here has no output attached and never did.

Rest that has a figure at the end of it is not rest

Now let me name what happened to your walk, because it is common and almost nobody catches it.

You did not stop resting. You optimized it. And optimization is such a well behaved instinct that it never announces itself as a problem: you got better shoes, you got more consistent, you went more often, and every single one of those is an improvement, and together they took the one thing in your week that was not for anything and gave it a purpose.

Once a thing has a purpose it can be done well or badly. And once it can be done badly it is no longer rest, whatever it looks like from outside, because rest is precisely the activity that cannot be failed.

You are allowed to do something that achieves nothing at all, and it is not a waste of a morning. Mark 6:31 has Jesus telling people to come apart and rest a while, in the middle of a stretch so busy they had not had leisure to eat, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that permission land in somebody who instinctively improves everything they touch.

And I am not handing you a scheme for this. No method for resting properly, nothing to keep up, and no target for how often you should sit on a stile. That would be the same instinct wearing a different coat, and you would be excellent at it, and it would not be rest either.

I am also not going to tell you which day, and this site never will. That question has cost more than it was worth and no reader will fail this article by having a different answer to it.

You are not the one holding this together, and nothing falls over in the ten minutes you sit down. Colossians 1:17 says by Him all things consist, and it is His Spirit at work in the machinery of an ordinary life, which means the small thing in you that notices the figure is a fear rather than a description.

God is the one holding you while you stop, and He has been holding all of it through two years of not stopping.