Urged to Rest

One might expect us, being back in Japan after over a year away, to be diligently, even desperately hustling to make connections, discover potential jobs, and otherwise find ways to stay this time - or at least ways to return sooner. I might've expected that too! But that hasn't been God's plan for us.

The recurring message of this time back in Hakodate has been, "This is a time of enjoyment! Don't worry about anything, don't set any expectations on yourself; just lean back and soak it all in." I was prepared, I think, for that message regarding, like, employment/visa stuff, since we'd long ago gotten the memo that God was handling all of that. But it's been applied to everything I've been starting to stress about. Honestly, even "stress" is too strong a word; whenever I start to feel any light pressure to accomplish something, God has put a hand on my shoulder, told me to take a deep breath, and assured me that he has it under control.

One of the first areas that he surprised me with that message was in studying Japanese. Cassie and I both are more excited than ever to really get conversational in the language, and alongside praying for God's help in my studies, I was making plans, figuring out how to really buckle down and be solidly N3 by the end of September. And then God was like, "Hey, wait - if you're praying for me to help, why do you feel the need to grind it out this hard? I'll teach you Japanese; don't worry so much."

This is not, generally speaking, how I live my life, or how I've advised people to live their lives. I still don't know if it's a good default for most people. I believe God gave us our minds and our ability to apply them to things with the intention that we would use them to the fullest. I think even a certain amount (or maybe certain types?) of stress can be good and healthy. I think that's still what he's expecting of me and training me to do in many aspects of my life. But for some reason, in some areas of my life - especially Japan and the Japanese language - he wants me instead to leave anything stressful, anything weighty, anything taxing to him.

Which is not to say I'm doing nothing. I'm still running flash cards every day, I'm still intentionally consuming Japanese media (mostly games at the moment); it's not that he wants me to be lazy or to avoid effort at all. But it's all, like, fun effort? Like the difference between jogging and playing a sport - they're both exercise, but one is exercise for exercise's sake, and one is exercise for enjoyment's sake.

The thing that helped crystallize these thoughts was my devotional today. Cassie and I have been reading God's Smuggler, by Brother Andrew, and at one point early in the book, he relates a time when he felt like something was holding him back, and he sat down somewhere alone and just prayed through it, for hours, not moving until God revealed to him what it was and got him past it. And I was like, "Oh, that sounds like a good thing to do periodically in every Christian's life," and started praying for God to prepare me for that and figuring out when and where I'd go to just sit and pray and ask God where in my life I was holding on to some sin, and ask him to help me let go of it.

But the message I got back, very quickly, was, "Why do you feel the need to buckle down on this? I'll help you grow; don't worry so much." Just a wave of assurance that he has plans for my spiritual health the same as he has plans for everything else, and he doesn't need me to figure out how to progress right now. He'll get to it when it needs to happen. I should just relax and enjoy myself right now.

And then today's My Utmost for His Highest really nailed it down:

Ultimately God will let nothing escape, every detail is under His scrutiny. In numberless ways God will bring us back to the same point over and over again. He never tires of bringing us to the one point until we learn the lesson, because He is producing the finished product.

And then it ended with:

Whatever it is, God will point it out with persistence until we are entirely His.

Reading the full text of the devotional, I'd wager that "don't try so hard" wasn't exactly what Oswald Chambers was expecting to convey as he wrote it, but it's very much how God used it with me, and it's just very... I mean, it's obviously comforting, but even more than that, it's comforting. It's obviously nice to hear God assure me that I don't need to stress about this, that, or the other thing, but it's especially comforting, on a very deep level, for him to repeat the message so often and so clearly that I can be confident I'm not mistaking it.

Another book I read lately - Hearing God, by Dallas Willard - has a lot to say, but one of the most game-changing ideas it presented was the idea that God speaks to you in your own thoughts. It suggests that learning to hear his voice isn't so much learning to hear something new as it is learning to distinguish his voice from yours - you're already hearing him, you just can't tell it's him.

(This is a pretty extreme summary of a pretty wild idea that I'm sharing here without any of the scriptural foundations, cautions or guidelines that Dallas Willard presents it with. So if the idea as I presented it here to you sounds dangerous to you, good! This is an idea that needs to be handled very carefully. But also, like, don't judge the book until you've read it.)

The scary part is when he's saying things that you want to hear - which is actually pretty often! - because it's so easy to imagine that it's not him speaking to you, it's you trying to convince yourself he is. It can be hard to trust that I'm really hearing God when everything he's saying is "Chill, bro! Don't try so hard." Which is why I so appreciate the lengths that he's going to to make it clear that it really is coming from him, not from me. He wants me to be cautious about that sort of thing in the general, he just also is telling me what I want to hear right now.

Of course, when you really think about it, is it that surprising that so much of what God would want to tell us is stuff we'd want to hear? "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" The more I come to understand the scale of the gift God gave us in his son, the easier it is to expect more good things from him in the future. The more I expect good things from him, the more good things from him I see.

Am I getting more of them, or just noticing more of them? Probably both.