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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

rest

Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest {Free E-Book!}

July 10, 2018 By Michelle

Oh, summer…a time of lazy afternoons by the pool, mystery novel in hand; days at the beach, drowsing to the sound of the surf, warm sun on your back; evenings on the back patio, sipping Chardonnay as the fireflies spark.

Wait…what? Your summer doesn’t look exactly like that? Yeah…mine either.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference in Wisconsin, my husband Brad was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and our two boys stayed home by themselves for the first time ever. In the 48 hours we were out of town, a water main burst in front of our house, the city had to dig up half our front yard, there was talk that the 50-year-old honey locust tree might have to be removed to get at the pipe (thankfully that didn’t happen), the dog you-know-whated on the rug and a son who shall not be named cleaned it up with the bleach spray he found under the kitchen cabinet, and, to top it off, all my homebound flights were cancelled due to weather, so I ended up having to rent a car to drive 9 hours back to Lincoln. Oh, and my sister and my nephew were due to arrive the next day…and sleep in the guest room where the dog you-know-whated and which was now flaunting freshly bleached carpet.

That’s summer for reals.

Which is why we all need to make a little more time for intentional rest, right?

I have a solution, and clearly I need to be first in line to take my own advice!

My new e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest, will help you:

  • Understand the mind, body and soul benefits of intentional rest
  • Learn how to step away from busyness and productivity in order to hear the quiet whispers of your soul
  • Integrate five concrete steps into your daily routine that will help you establish a short but impactful daily practice of silence, reflection, and rest.

I’ve been practicing daily intentional rest for as little as five minutes a day for more than a year now, and I can assure you from first-hand experience that this little tweak to your day can and will have a profound impact on your whole life.

Five minutes isn’t much…but it’s enough to change everything.

If you’d like to know how you, too, can integrate the practice of intentional rest into your day, I’d like to send you a free downloadable copy of Learning to Listen to Your Soul. You can sign up HERE. 

I would love for you (and I) to have a lazy summer spent lounging under a beach umbrella, but if that’s not your reality, the next best thing would be to learn to how truly rest amid the crazy. My hope is that this little e-book will help you do exactly that.

As Ruth Haley Barton writes in Invitation to Solitude and Silence, “The presence of God is poured out most generously when there is space in our souls to receive him.”

Together, let’s make the space in our souls to receive the presence of God, this summer and beyond.

::

Friends, if you already subscribe to my blog posts or to my monthly newsletter by email: you should have received a link to download my new e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul, on Monday in your in-box. Drop me an email if you did not receive it, and I will get it right out to you. Thank you for reading and subscribing!

Filed Under: rest, True You Tagged With: rest, True You

Allowing Space in Order to Be Filled

April 11, 2018 By Michelle

This time of year I’m always itchy to get my hands in the dirt. As the temperature begins to warm and the ground thaws, I am filled with a restless energy, eager to slip my feet into my plastic gardening clogs, grab a spade from the garage, and dig in.

I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes from clearing a bed of decayed oak leaves, shelled acorns and desiccated weeds, carefully pulling away the detritus of winter to reveal tender green perennials peeking up through the soil.

I love mixing in the dark, loamy compost, turning over the dirt with my shovel and then smoothing it flat with the hoe.

I love carving a shallow trench with my trowel, tearing open a packet of Romaine lettuce seeds, dropping them one by one into the earth and then pushing the soil gently over them with my gloved hand.

The trouble is, I don’t always follow the directions on the back of the seed packet. Rather than spacing my lettuce seeds the recommended six to eight inches apart, I cram them into the soil, sometimes barely allowing an inch or two between seeds. Inevitably, after the seedlings have sprouted a few weeks later, I’m forced to thin my rows, pulling perfectly healthy plants and tossing them into the compost pile in order to make room for the others to flourish.

Maybe you recognize the metaphor here. Perhaps you, too, have the tendency to overplant not just in the garden, but in your life as well.

I often fill my days, weeks and months to overflowing, cramming every bit of space with more – more busyness, more commitments, more projects, more socializing, more stuff. I buy more, I plan more, I do more, I produce more. I sow so many seeds, my “plants” end up jammed together with no space in between.

I believe this urge to sow our days with an overabundance of seeds and to crowd every space to overcapacity comes from an unnamed desire within us, a deep longing for contentment, fulfillment and peace and, beneath that, a longing to be known, valued and loved.

Some of us attempt to quench this longing with a full calendar and a demanding schedule. Others turn to food, alcohol, drugs, another name brand purse or a larger, fancier house to fill the void.

We strive to fill this deep yearning we sense in ourselves, not realizing, or perhaps not admitting, that the best thing we can do is to be “receptive to the unfulfilled,” as author Sara Miles says, neither filling it nor denying it, but simply sitting with the emptiness and acknowledging the presence of longing.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord,” St. Augustine of Hippo once wrote, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Herein lies the essence of our longing. God made us for him – to be with him and in him, to be known by him and loved by him.

He made us in his image as his most precious beloveds, and yet, we cannot rest in intimate communion with him until we make space in our crowded lives for him to enter in.

We must first allow ourselves to be empty, to sit like tiny seeds, vulnerable in the dark spaciousness. We must acknowledge and listen to the longing deep within us without scrambling to fill it, trusting that in time, God will meet us there and fill us with himself.

This post first ran in the Lincoln Journal Star on April 7.

Filed Under: rest, slow, spiritual practices Tagged With: space, spiritual disciple of gardening, St. Augustine

Winter is a Time for Rest

January 22, 2018 By Michelle

As I write this, snow is blowing horizontally across my backyard. The wind is whipping the white pine boughs, and the bird feeders are swaying precariously on their shepherd’s poles.

Two downy woodpeckers clutch the finch feeder for dear life, waiting out the gusts until it is safe enough to peck for seed again. The juncos are tucked deep in the bare lilac shrub, seven of them, plump like black and white fruit. In between gusts they pepper the ground beneath the feeder until something startles them and they swoop altogether into the shrub again.

I’ve just returned from some errands. Nothing that couldn’t wait – the post office, Walgreen’s, the library to drop off two not-yet-due books. The errands were an excuse to go out, because the truth is, I love driving in a snowstorm.

There’s something about inching along at 25 mph, both hands on the wheel, zipped into my cozy parka, heat blasting from the dashboard vents, knit hat snug over my ears, crunch of snow under the tires. I find it strangely relaxing.

 

There were few cars on the road, and those who dared brave the weather crawled along, wipers shushing, windows fogging, snow trailing from their roofs like wisps streaming off a mountain peak. I feel a kinship with these weather-be-damned wanderers. Some are undoubtedly on the road because they have to be, some simply because they want to be, like me.

When I stepped through the automatic doors of Walgreen’s I saw the store was empty, save a mom and her daughter. The girl was sick; I could tell by her red-rimmed nose and glassy eyes. A fuzzy, pink robe hung below her jacket. “What a disappointment to be sick on a snow day,” the pharmacy clerk said to her, smiling sympathetically as the girl leaned heavily against the counter.

The post office was empty too, and that never happens. I strode directly up to the counter and in two minutes flat made the arrangements to mail my package. I wondered if the clerk thought it odd that I chose book rate, the slowest delivery method, yet braved a blizzard to get to the post office today. I didn’t offer an explanation for my seemingly contradictory actions.

Back on the road, the snow and wind had worsened. Earlier, when I had looked at the weather-in-motion radar image on my laptop, the storm swirled, an impressive swath of blue over most of Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. Instead of moving west to east across the Great Plains like storms in this part of the country typically do, it was circling counter clockwise, like a hurricane. Clearly I had departed my house in the eye and was now being lashed by the tail.

I turned the car toward home.

I used to detest winter, and I still don’t like when the temperature is so frigid that I can’t even walk the dog. But in recent years I’ve found the winter months are growing on me.

January and February’s calendar pages offer a welcome white space that matches the austere emptiness of the outdoors. My days are generally quieter, my social and work life less frenetic. Most evenings I’m happy to be buttoned into my flannels by 7, in bed by 9, an open book propped on my chest.

By mid-March I’ll be anxious to get into the garden. I always have to hold myself back from bagging up the dead oak leaves that blanket the flower beds, so eager am I to plunge my hands into still-chilled soil, to uncover tender green shoots.

But for now I am content to stay cocooned, quiet and slow, resting, like a papery tulip bulb biding its time deep beneath the dirt.

Filed Under: quiet, rest Tagged With: driving in a snowstorm, winter quiet

Why We So Badly Need Sabbath Rest {and a book giveaway!}

October 4, 2016 By Michelle

dam-walk

Rest typically comes last for me. Rest comes after the chores are done and the errands are run. Rest comes after every item on my to-do is checked off. I rest once my obligations and responsibilities are accomplished.

This approach to rest, however, is not God’s way. It’s not his way for himself, and it’s not the way he desires for us. Sure, God rested on the seventh day, after he’d created light and oceans, the stars in the sky and the land beneath our feet. But the fact is, God took that day of rest in the middle of his work. God is still working. He is still creating. He took a day of rest after six days of work, and then, he took up his work again.

Somewhere along the line, I forgot about this rhythm. I forgot that God desires that our work be punctuated with rest, even when our work is not finished.

Last week I picked up Shelly Miller’s new book Rhythms of Rest: Finding the Spirit of Sabbath in a Busy World. I’d already read her book this past summer, when I received an advance copy in order to write an endorsement. I enjoyed Rhythms of Rest immensely the first time I read it, but truth be told, the reason I picked it up again last week was that I knew I was going to write this blog post to go along with a giveaway, and I wanted to refresh my memory.

rhythms-of-rest-endorsement-derusha

I didn’t expect to read Rhythms of Rest cover-to-cover again. I didn’t expect it to impact me so deeply. I didn’t expect it to change my weekend…and my life.

Here’s the truth: I was all in on Sabbath rest a couple of years ago. I believed in it and was committed to it. But somehow, as weeks passed into months and months passed into years, I chipped away at the edges of my Sabbath practice until finally, there was nothing left. Without even being aware of it, my Sundays became another day of chores, errands, social media and catching up on email.

These past few months, I’ve come to understand in a new and deeper way that what God desires most is relationship with us. He doesn’t care nearly as much about what we do and what we accomplish as he does about who we are, and, more specifically, about who we are in relationship with him. God wants us to know him; it’s really as simple as that.

What I’ve come to understand – and what Shelly’s book reiterated for me — is that in order to know God in the way he desires, we need to make space and time for him. And in order to make space and time for him, we have to quiet ourselves. We have to cease our constant busyness, our constant doing and accomplishing.

Practicing Sabbath rest makes time and space for us to be in relationship with God.

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rowanonbike

leavesagainstsky

Shelly puts it like this:

“How much of our faith journey is firsthand experience and not just what we know about him? Information helps us know about God, but Sabbath allows us to encounter him.”

Sabbath allows us to encounter God.

This past Sunday I intentionally practiced Sabbath rest for first time in a long, long time. I sat with my son Noah on the back patio and talked as we ate lunch. I leisurely walked the dog around a nearby lake and admired the changing leaves and the golden sunlight. I rested in my lounge chair on my back patio, Rhythms of Rest open in my lap. I kept my computer closed and my phone on my nightstand. I didn’t do a single dish for the day until 8:30 p.m.

And you know what? It was the best day I’ve had in a long, long time. It wasn’t special in any extraordinary way. But it was beautiful. It was replenishing and restful. It was Sabbath.

 

I am delighted to be able to give away TWO copies of Shelly Miller’s delightful book Rhythms of Rest. Enter the random drawing below for a chance to win {email readers: click here and scroll to the bottom of the post to enter the drawing}:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Filed Under: book reviews, rest, Sabbath Tagged With: practicing Sabbath, Rhythms of Rest, Shelly Miller

Weekend One Word: Close

October 1, 2016 By Michelle

How to Come Close to God

Do you realize that God wants nothing more than to be in relationship with you? It’s true. He doesn’t need you to be good or perfect or on your best behavior. He doesn’t even require that you confess your sins in order to be in relationship with him. He simply wants you to walk toward him and enter into his embrace. He makes the first move; he extends the invitation. But he leaves it up to us as to whether or not we will answer yes. He patiently waits for us to turn back toward him, where he is waiting with open arms.

So what gets in the way of our coming closer to him? What’s stopping us from being in a close, personal, intimate relationship with God?

Busyness.

Distraction.

An incessant drive to produce and accomplish.

An inability to rest.

We miss God’s invitation to come closer because we don’t make time amid our busy, noisy, go-go-go world to stop and listen for his voice. As Shelly Miller says in her beautiful book Rhythms of Rest (stay tuned next week for more about this book and a giveway!), “God is patiently waiting for you to slow down so he can express his love for you.”

God’s love, his invitation, is there. It sits like an unopened envelope in a mailbox. “Come closer,” he invites. And he waits for us to slow, to listen, to say yes.

Filed Under: One Word, rest Tagged With: James 4:8, rest, Rhythms of Rest, Shelly Miller

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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