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When I was in college, my parents got divorced. Overcommitting myself with school and social life was a way to stay too busy to think about the brokenness of my family. I was so busy and I just couldn’t give up. But then I fell ill – and I was forced to stop. To feel. To rest.
I forgot to stop and recognize what I was creating from the brokenness. Not every piece could be salvaged, and not everything was “good,” but I was still able to create.
Maybe creation is breaking apart in order to make something new. When God created the world as we know it, maybe stars needed to be crushed in order to form the rock of the earth. Maybe we all come from those broken stars, bits of shattered fire that reside within our bodies. Maybe in order to create, we need to stop, to take a moment to feel our brokenness, feel our beauty, feel our reality. When we stop to rest, we ready ourselves for creation, for putting the pieces back together, or for taking the next steps on our journey. Rest is sacred.
This message is excerpted from “Running from rest” by Elyssa Salinas Lazarski in the July 2019 Café online magazine.