Sweet rest is sufficient.
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“My grace is sufficient for you.” Recently I experienced one of those heavyweight championship bouts with horrendous insomnia. Some of you know the kind – top ten terrible — when you are awake alone for so many hours you go beyond worrying whether you will sleep that night and begin to believe you will never actually sleep again.
Finally, I remembered one of the best strategies for beating the monstrous fear, which is the larger beast than the Insomnia itself – rest. Repeat something true and meaningful — for me, on this night, “Be still and know that I am God, came to mind.” Repeat it gently, and rest in its reality. Take deep breaths, and rest. Be very still. Know that God is God.
As my body began to calm and my mind began to slow the race, another verse entered my head, welcome but unsought: “My grace is sufficient for you.”
There is no fairy tale ending. I didn’t fall asleep and rest like an infant should. I drifted eventually into one of those light imitation versions of pseudo-sleep and woke feeling the reality of the night, as if I had hardly slept at all. BUT – I did rediscover the reality I need to know in times of fullness and scarcity – God’s grace is sufficient. I actually marveled through the day at how relatively energetic I felt – where did that come from, I would think, as I walked out of an hour and a half at PT with a little extra?
Brene Brown talks about how fear of not having enough interferes with an attitude of joy: “These are anxious and fearful times, both of which breed scarcity. We’re afraid to lose what we love the most, and we hate that there are no guarantees. We think if we can beat vulnerability to the punch by imaging loss, we’ll suffer less. We’re wrong. There is one guarantee: if we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to know joy, we are missing out on the two things that will actually sustain us during the hard times.” The Gift of Imperfection
She quotes Lynne Twist’s book, The Soul of Money about being enough:
“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” the next one is, “I don’t have enough time.” whether true or not, that thought of ‘not enough’ occurs to us automatically before we even think to examine it or question it….
We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mindset of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and we’re not enough.”
I think Brown and Twist are on to something with this fear of scarcity. They take me back to my need to rest in the heart of sufficiency:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” 2Corinthians 12:9
How about you? What do you not have enough of, or fear not having enough of? How does God meet you in this fear?
