Count the Rest
I like to listen in to the kids’ piano lessons. Not because it makes me feel like a good homeschool mom (nope, mostly there’s mom guilt for not helping them practice more) but because it’s kind of nice to hear someone else struggling to beat new ideas into their brains for once. (Don’t judge.)
Regardless, this week, I overheard the piano teacher saying to Bee multiple times, “You’ve got to count the rest. You can’t skip it.” And I thought to myself: how true.
Without the rests, the music is rushed. Without the rests, it’s hard to get your fingers in the right spots. Without the rests, everything feels off.
It applies to our lives too.
Now, some of us (me, recovering from Covid, maybe) want life to just be all rest. We don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. We want it to be time for recess (is that still a thing?). And we are ready for bedtime…at all times.
But the truth is: that’s boring. If life were all rest, it wouldn’t be music worth listening to. No one wants to listen to that. {John Cage, I’m looking at you with your 4’33”.}
Most of the time though, we have the opposite problem: we think we can just zip by the called for rests without losing anything. And we’re wrong.
In the first chapter of the Bible, we learn that God worked for six days and then He rested on the seventh. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure God wasn’t leaning over His knees panting, trying to catch his breath while sweat dripped in His eyes and He considered never creating anything ever again. Neither did He need to take a nap to catch back up on lost sleep. And He wasn’t sitting down with his feet up on the coffee table while draining a restorative cup of tea and telling the world to just give Him five minutes (five minutes!) of quiet. No, creation didn’t wear God out enough that He could no longer appreciate what He had done. Rather, He looked at the world He’d made and declared it good…and very good.
We know that God rested not because He needed to but because He was setting the example He wanted us to follow. An example of rest. Of pause. Of Sabbath. Of stillness. Of reprieve.
He did so because He knew that the music of work would be much more beautiful to listen to if the rests were counted—and not rushed. He knew we might need time to get our fingers in the right places (metaphorically, you know). He knew that without the rests, everything else in our lives would feel off.
It’s may not be realistic for all of us to collectively agree to set aside Sundays to sit around on our rears and do nothing. But we can still count the rests.
We can say, one day a week, I’m taking a break from laundry (unless someone pees their sheets) or cooking (unless I find that super life giving) or doing homework (unless I realize that I am completely incapable of time management). Or we can say, after school is finished (or I’ve survived all the meetings that could’ve been emails), I’m going to take fifteen minutes to just sit and be still and not talk…before I tackle the next thing. Or my phone is going on silent before dinner, and I don’t have to turn the notifications back on until after I’ve had my coffee the next morning. Or I’m going to take a walk every morning and carefully protect those 45 minutes of quiet. Or I really am going to take a full day once a week (and it doesn’t have to be Sunday!) and try to be purposeful to rest.
God gave us a world with days and nights, with seasons, with Sabbaths. He built in rest time out of his love for us—like the parent of a preschooler who knows that an afternoon nap makes the rest of the day far more tolerable.
So why don’t we ask ourselves: how can we count the rests so that we can make the music of work more beautiful?
Well, we have to be purposeful. We have to prioritize. And we have to know that the rests are worth counting.
We have to know that counting the rests makes our life’s music far more beautiful than just rushing past them to get to the end of the song.
