Enforced "Rest"

The couch I shared with Elsa

Two years ago Elsa and I ended up on the couch - hardly able even to sit up to eat for the first while.

Well meaning people would tell us to "just rest" - as if it was a privilege. I even wondered wryly if this was God's way of giving the "sabbatical" I had wished for in prior years.

But I wasn't remembering Matthew 7:9-11:

"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!"

One good gift came in the form of a package from a friend containing two books by Amy Carmichael. How encouraging it was to read of this strong woman of God going through a similar trial. Maybe today she can encourage you too?

"One day, after weeks of nights when, in spite of all that was done to induce sleep, it refused to come, except in brief distracted snatches, the mail brought a letter which discoursed with what sounded almost like pleasure on this 'enforced rest,' and the silly phrase rankled like a thorn. I was far too tired to laugh it off as one can laugh off things when one is well. 

"So this was supposed to be rest? and was the Father breaking, crushing, 'forcing,' by weight of sheer physical misery, a child who only longed to obey His lightest wish? This word had what I now know was an absurd power to distress. It held such an unkind, such a false conception of our Father. 

"... I had no peace till I had heard deep within me soft and soothing words such as a mother uses: 'Let not your heart be troubled; do I not understand? What do such words matter to Me or to thee?' And I knew that the Father understood His child, and the child her Father, and all was peace again. ...

"It was then that the thought of the many to whom unrecorded little pangs must be daily commonplaces came with a new compassion, born of a new understanding. And I wanted to share my crumb of comfort at once, and tell them not to weigh flying words, or let their peace be in the mouths of men, or allow the ignorant stock phrases of the well to the ill to penetrate their shield. 'For no man can tell what in that combat attends us but he that hath been in the battle himself'; so how can they, the unwounded, know anything about the matter?

"But the Lord our Creator knows (and all who have ever suffered know) that pain and helplessness are not rest, and never can be; nor is the weakness that follows acute pain, nor the tiredness that is so tired of being tired that it is poles apart from rest. 

He knows that rest is found in that sense of well-being one has after a gallop on horseback, or a plunge in a forest pool or the glorious sea - in physical and in mental fitness, in power to be and do. He knows it. He created us so, and does the Creator forget? If He remembers, what does it matter that others forget?"

Amy Carmichael, Rose from Brier 

And so God can keep His children soft amid that which threatens to make us hard and bitter.

When we could walk so far, another "couch" was a blanket on the grass.