An Extra Hour

There are few better feelings than waking up in the morning, knowing you have to begin the day, stumbling to the bathroom, catching the time on the clock, and realizing with pure joy that you can go back to bed because you have an hour yet before you have to wake up.

AH! The lovely feeling of crawling back into your still warm bed and drifting back to la-la-land. This happened to me this morning, and it was pure bliss.

Rest is so beautiful because life is the opposite of rest. Life is work, a lot of work. Whether it’s your 9 to 5 or the business of raising children, the more you work, the more you appreciate your bed at night or that hard-earned vacation in the summer.

Christmas is not often associated with rest. Christmas is associated with running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Flapping wildly and kicking up dirty dust, often without identifiable purpose. As we head into the last week of Christmas, I can feel my heart gearing up for one last week of holiday madness: packing, shopping, working, writing, running errands, cleaning, Christmas programs, cooking, herding my children, checking things off a mile long list.

But as I write, I realize that I’ve left some important things off my list. Prayer is one, reading God’s Word is another. As I think about the next week, these things aren’t in the forefront of my mind. Instead, in the homestretch of Christmas, these things are often the first to go.

Luther once said that during especially busy times during his life…I can only imagine what busy times in his life were like: preparing speeches for the Emperor, translation due dates for the New Testament, preaching to hundreds…he got up an extra hour early to pray.

Mind blown.

But I’m beginning to realize that this is the only way to make it through busy or difficult times in our lives. If there’s any way to make it to the end of Christmas week, it’s with the peace, fulfillment and joy that comes from starting the day on our knees.

True rest, the kind that flows from our hearts, is obtained when we open the pages of Scripture and read the sweet gospel message that Jesus has lifted the burden of sin and death from our backs. True rest is obtained when we lay all our worries, frustrations, and shortcomings at our Father’s throne in prayer. True rest comes from putting everything down for an hour, and following the star away from the bustling city of Bethlehem to a small, hidden away stable.