Returning to a Rest You Left Years Ago

There was something you used to do.

Not a hobby exactly, though it might have been. Something small and yours. Drawing, or the walk up past the reservoir, or the particular chair on a Sunday afternoon, or the sewing, or the two hours with the radio on and nobody talking.

You have not done it in years.

And here is the part that is strange enough to be worth a whole article: you cannot say when it stopped.

There was no last time that felt like a last time. Nobody took it. There was no argument about it and no decision. If somebody asked you what year it went you would guess, and you would guess wrong, and you would guess by about four years.

That is how these things go, and it is worth naming plainly. A person does not lose the thing that is theirs in a moment. It is displaced, slowly, by things that were more urgent on the day, every one of which was reasonable, until enough weeks have passed that it stops being a thing you do and becomes a thing you used to do.

And the tense change happens silently. Nobody announces it. By the time anybody notices, it is simply in the past.

Return is a word about a place already known

There is a line in a psalm that speaks to this more exactly than anything else I know, and the first word is the whole of it.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. (Psalm 116:7, King James Version)

Return.

A person can only return to somewhere they have been. That is not a poetic reading, it is what the word requires. The verse is not describing a rest to be found or built or discovered. It assumes a rest that was once occupied and is not currently occupied, and it tells a soul to go back to it.

Which means the psalm is written for exactly your situation and not for the general one. Not for a person who has never had it. For a person who had it, and drifted, and has not been back.

You are being told to return rather than to begin, and the place has never once stopped being yours while you were away from it. Psalm 116:7 uses a word that assumes a rest already known rather than one still to be found, and it is the Holy Spirit who can make a thing a person left feel available again rather than closed.

He is speaking to himself

Now something about who says it, and it matters practically.

O my soul.

The psalmist is not being addressed by somebody else. He is addressing himself. Nobody came and told him to go back. Nobody noticed. He looked at his own state, and he spoke to himself about it, out loud enough that it got written down.

That is the mechanism you need, and it is the one thing this situation has always lacked.

Because nobody is going to tell you. The people who love you do not know it went. They cannot, because it went silently and because everything has looked fine, and looking fine is the whole reason nothing has ever been said.

There is no rescue coming for a thing nobody knows is missing. There is only a person noticing, and then speaking to their own soul about it, which is what the psalm is doing and why it survived.

You are the one who gets to name it, and it has never once been going to be noticed by anybody standing nearby. Psalm 116:7 has a man speak to his own soul rather than wait to be spoken to. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a person's own voice about themselves gentle rather than accusing.

I want to say something about the second half of that verse too, because it guards the first. For the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. The reason given for returning is not that the soul deserves it or has earned a break. The reason is that God has been generous. The return is a response to His character rather than a claim about your own.

You are returning on the strength of His generosity, and it has never once had to be justified by how hard the last few years were. The written word gives God's bounty as the reason rather than the person's exhaustion, and His Spirit is entirely able to hand something back without weighing whether it was needed enough.

Twenty minutes, and do not restart it

Now the practical part, and the shape of it is deliberate.

Do not restart it.

That is the instruction and it is going to feel wrong. Everything in a person wants to bring it back properly. Get the things out. Set aside a proper afternoon. Do it justice, because it deserves better than a scrap.

That is exactly how it will not happen. A thing that requires a proper afternoon requires a week that does not exist, and it will wait for that week for another four years, the same way it has been waiting.

Twenty minutes. Badly. This week.

Not the whole walk, the first field. Not the sewing project, one seam. Not the two hours, twenty minutes with the radio on.

And say the name of it out loud first, because a thing that has drifted into the past tense needs somebody to say it in the present, and there is nobody else here to do that.

You are able to have twenty ordinary minutes of it, and it has never once needed to be done properly to be done at all. Psalm 116:7 tells a soul to return rather than to prepare. The same Spirit who moved on the psalmist is not waiting for anybody to do a thing justice before He will meet them in it.