Sitting Without Making It a Practice

Think back to the last time you decided to start resting properly.

There was a decision, and it was a good one, and it probably had a shape to it. Twenty minutes. Every morning. Before anyone else was up. Possibly a notebook was involved. Possibly it had a name, either one you gave it or one you borrowed from somebody whose life looked calmer than yours.

Day one went well. Day two went well. Day three was shorter. Day four did not happen, because of a real reason, and the real reason was genuinely real.

Day five did not happen either, and that one had no reason at all, and that was the day it actually ended, though it took another two weeks for you to admit it.

And here is the bit that matters, the bit that is worth this whole article: you did not go back to resting the way you had before. You went to less than before. Because now the rest had a name, and the name had a record, and the record said you had failed at it.

That is how a person ends up worse off for having tried. Not because rest is hard, but because a target got attached to it, and the target turned an ordinary human thing into something with a scoreboard.

Read what it is actually asking

There is a line in Psalm thirty seven that gets quoted at people in this exact condition, usually with the best of intentions, and it is worth reading with the target taken off.

Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him. (Psalm 37:7, King James Version)

Look at where the rest is put. Not rest for a period. Not rest daily. Rest in the LORD.

It is a preposition, and it changes everything. In names a place, or better, a person. The instruction is about where the resting happens, not about how long it goes on or how often it recurs or whether it happened yesterday.

There is no duration in that verse. There is no frequency in that verse. There is no streak to break, because there is nothing there that could be counted.

You are being pointed at a person rather than handed a target, and there has never once been a number attached to that instruction. Psalm 37:7 says rest in the LORD without a single measure beside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse that has been used as a standard and gives it back as an invitation.

What a name does to a thing

Now let me say something about naming, because it is not an obvious harm and it deserves a proper explanation.

Naming a thing is usually good. A named thing can be discussed and defended and put in a calendar, and half of this site is about naming one concrete thing and doing it.

But a name does something else as well, and this is the part that catches people out. A name creates a record. And once there is a record, every instance of the thing is now either an entry or a gap, and a gap is something a person can fail at.

Unnamed sitting cannot be failed at. That is not a loophole, it is the actual mechanism. Nobody has ever lain awake feeling guilty about a Tuesday they did not sit on a wall, because sitting on a wall was never a practice.

You are allowed to do the thing without opening a record on it, and stillness has never once needed a scoreboard to be real. Psalm 37:7 puts the resting in a person rather than in a routine. The Spirit of God is under no obligation to log anything anybody does.

I do want to be fair about this, because disciplines are not the enemy. Some people flourish with a set hour and a notebook and they should carry on exactly as they are. If that is you, none of this is aimed at you.

You are the one who knows which kind you are, and nothing here has ever been a rule for everybody in the room. The written word gives the instruction without a method attached to it, and His Spirit deals with people one at a time rather than in categories.

Wait patiently is not a technique either

The second half of the verse gets treated the same way, and it should not be.

Wait patiently for him.

That gets read as an instruction to be good at waiting. To be serene about it. To get better at it over time, presumably measurably.

But waiting is not a skill and there is no such thing as being advanced at it. Waiting is a position, not a performance. A person waiting badly, fidgeting, checking, sighing, is still waiting. They are in exactly the same place as the person waiting beautifully, and the verse does not distinguish between them.

That is a mercy, and it is aimed straight at a certain kind of person. The kind who would turn even patience into something to get better at, and then rank themselves against how it went last week.

You are waiting even when it is going badly, and that has never once been graded by how it felt while it happened. Psalm 37:7 gives waiting as a posture rather than as a proficiency. The same Spirit who searches the heart is not standing over anybody with a mark sheet.