Rest A While

Mark 6:30–34

I closed one task yesterday and found six more queuing behind it. The Gateway rota, an Academy deck for November, an assignment due at the Institute, a partner meeting, a prison visit to prepare for, and somewhere in the middle two boys who want their father and not their father’s phone. Each one asks for undivided attention, and undivided is precisely what I do not have.

I tell our Restarters that a rushed shot burns. You cannot hurry extraction. Pull it too fast and it comes out thin and sour — the coffee simply tells the truth about the hands that made it. Then I walk out of the training bar and rush at everything else.

What arrests me in Mark 6 is that Jesus does not rebuke the disciples for being tired. They return full of report — all they had done and taught (v. 30) — and He does not ask for more. He takes them away by boat to a solitary place (v. 32). No performance review. No stretch target. Just come away, and rest a while.

Then the sting: the crowd runs round the shore and arrives ahead of them (v. 33). Rest did not remove the demand. Five thousand hungry people were waiting on the far side of that boat ride. But Jesus steps out, sees them, and is moved with compassion because they are sheep without a shepherd (v. 34). He had been with the Father, so He had something to give.

That is the difference I keep missing. Slowing down is not the reward at the end of the work; it is what makes the work bearable and the compassion real. When I walk into Changi depleted, I am a functionary with a schedule. When I go in having been quiet before God, I actually see the man sitting in front of me.

So I am asking the Lord for a rhythm rather than a rescue. Small solitary places built into an ordinary Singapore day — before the café opens, on the bus to a meeting, in the pause between one closed task and the next six. Not to escape the calling, but to keep company with the One who gave it.

Soli Deo Gloria