The Cushion

The waves were breaking into the boat, and Jesus was asleep in the stern. Beneath him lay a cushion. Around him, the vessel carried the movement of the sea, rising and falling under a wind that was driving water over its sides. What belonged beneath the boat was gathering inside it.

Earlier, the boat had served as a makeshift stage and pulpit. The crowd beside the sea had grown so large that Jesus sat offshore and taught while the people remained on land. His voice crossed the water toward them. He spoke about a sower scattering seed, a lamp brought into a house, a kingdom growing in ways the person who planted could not govern. The people listened from the shore.

When evening came, he told his disciples to cross to the other side. They left the crowd and took him with them just as he was, already aboard. Other boats accompanied them. Behind them lay the place where he had been teaching; ahead lay the crossing.

Then the wind rose.

The waves struck and came aboard. The vessel was filling, and each one brought more of the sea into the space they occupied. Shore lay behind and ahead, but either direction required remaining on the water. They could wake the man in the stern. They could not step out of the boat.

Jesus remained asleep.

The disciples woke him with a question that carried their fear directly into an accusation.

“Teacher, don’t you care that we are dying?”

He was close enough to wake, present in the same vessel and exposed to the same storm. Yet his sleep had become difficult to reconcile with their danger. Water was coming over the sides, and the one they had followed had to be roused.

Don’t you care?

Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind. Then he spoke to the sea.

“Peace! Be still!”

The wind ceased. The water that had been breaking into the boat became calm around it. The men who had awakened him remained there with him, carried now upon a sea that had obeyed his voice.

He asked why they were afraid. He asked about their faith.

A few moments earlier, they had feared what the water could do. Now the water was calm, and they were greatly afraid.

“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

The question moved among men who knew his voice, could recognize him in a crowd and had already chosen to follow him. Yet here, with the shore still ahead and the storm silenced around them, they were asking who he was.

In the stern lay the cushion where he had been sleeping.

My son Jared and I talk every week. At 10:37 last Wednesday night, he sent me a question for our next phone call.

“What is your relationship with rest?”

My first impulse was to turn the question into an assignment. That may have answered more than I intended.

I told him I wanted to think about what actually leaves me rested, how comfortable I am allowing something to remain unfinished, and the things I enjoy doing that might look like work from the outside. Within a few sentences, I had organized rest into a small research project.

Then I asked what had prompted it.

Jared had been thinking about people who announce that they need a vacation in the middle of a demanding period at work. He could not imagine enjoying one while the work remained unfinished.

“Until the work is done, my mind cannot rest,” he wrote. “I’m always problem solving. And even after it’s finished, I’m thinking about how I could have done it better.” He said he could truly rest between projects. Once he committed to something, he intended to see it through.

I replied that he had my mind twirling and that I was considering writing about rest.

Jared asked about rest. I opened a project. You are reading the evidence.

There is something in his answer I want to honor. Someone who stays with difficult work gives others something solid to depend upon. A promise means more when the person making it intends to remain through the inconvenient parts. I would not want to talk about rest in a way that makes faithfulness sound like a defect. Nor am I certain that rest can always be recognized from the outside. Writing sometimes looks like work when it is restoring me. An occupied mind is not necessarily a burdened one. Some questions take energy from us. Others somehow return it.

Still, his description of what happens after a project is finished stayed with me. A task can be complete while the mind continues revising it. We remember the decision we would change, the detail we missed, or the better route that became visible only after taking the longer one. There is learning available in that review.

There may also be no obvious place to stop.

Jared’s wording made me realize that I had usually thought of rest as a condition rather than a relationship. I imagined it as something a person either had or needed, took or postponed.

A relationship develops through repeated choices. We establish expectations and decide the terms under which we will make ourselves available.

We can welcome rest when it arrives or ask it to come back later. We can treat it as necessary care or as compensation for completed work. We can receive it in the middle of responsibility or insist that it wait until nothing remains unfinished.

That last condition gives rest a very long wait.

Work has a remarkable ability to reproduce while no one is watching.

The terms we place on rest do more than organize our calendars. They gradually teach us when we are allowed to stop and what must be true before we can receive care.

Jesus slept before they reached the other side.

That detail has begun to reshape the way I answer Jared. Jesus’ sleep and his care for the disciples occupied the same boat.

Later, when the disciples returned from their own work and could scarcely find time to eat, Jesus invited them to come away and rest. People were still coming and going. The needs had not disappeared.

Jesus’ rest belonged to the crossing, not merely to what came after it. It did not cancel his care for the people in the boat or his purpose on the other side.

Rest is not always the reward for faithfulness. Sometimes it is part of how faithfulness continues.

When Jared and I talk again, I think I know what I will tell him.

I have spent much of my life believing rest belonged to the far shore.

Lately, I have been thinking about the cushion.

Until next time,

George

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Scripture: Mark 4 and Mark 6:30–34. Quotations are from the World English Bible.