“The best medicine of all is resting” Benjamin Franklin

On a soft, thick mattress, on a leather couch or perhaps a simple wooden chair, surrender your body, stop all your movement and relax. Let your muscles loosen up and repair themselves. Let your brain stop trying to decipher your problems and instead find a place for all the data swirling around in your head. Let your heart slow down to a steady rhythm. Let all your anger, grief and worry dissolve out of your heart. Just relax and step into the Utopia of rest.

Though activity and hard work are often encouraged, without rest, they lose their quality. Rest is a vital aspect of life. It is a way in which we portray our gratitude for the efforts we were able to exert, for the strength we were gifted with. By resting, we show humility- despite all the strength we can muster into our bodies, as human beings, we are weak and tiredness always inflicts us at some point.

“What is without periods of rest will not endure.” Without physical rest, our bodies wear down quicker, and we are forced to stare at the gory walls of our graves sooner than necessary. When we rest after physical exertion, the broken fibers of our muscles are mended and made even stronger than before. On the other hand, neglecting rest slays our immune system making it easier for viruses and diseases to unleash their malice upon our bodies.

Some say relaxing the brain is fatal, but there is a virtue in rest and a virtue in work. After loading heaps of facts into your head, it is necessary to rest for your brain to organize the new information and store it for long term use. Even after juggling your brain vigorously trying to unearth a solution to a problem, rest by turning to a different activity for a while. Perhaps thus, the solution might independently surface in your brain. Constantly burning the midnight candle on books and problems might rob you of concentration and precious happiness.

Sometimes, we become overwhelmed by troublesome emotions such as anger, grief and worry. It is a more daunting task to find an escape from these feelings. But is still necessary to try and veil their causes for a while, to forget about them and allow joy to stream into your system. If we are constantly bombarded with these feelings, we may develop hatred for the gift of live- a dangerous feeling.

When the challenges of life have depleted all our strength, when we take the last step in our life’s journey, we shall enter into eternal rest. The claws of grief dig deep into our hearts when this happens to a loved one. We experience excruciating pain. Torturous questions infect our minds: why us? why now? Our lives seem to be plunged into thick, suffocating darkness. However, death, as undesirable as it may be, is an essential part of life. Eternal rest awaits all of us. It will free us from the evils of a cruel world so that we may be troubled no more. It will save us from everlasting condemnation into a diseased, decaying world.

“ By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day, he rested from all his work.” Genesis 2:2