The Daily Pearl
On Rest
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Matthew 11 : 28
A Prayer for This Morning
Father, I bring you the weight I have carried as though it were mine to carry alone. Teach me the trust that stopping requires. Let me lay the day down at your feet and find that it is held.
Affirmation
I can stop before everything is finished, because I am not the one holding the world together.
The Reflection
The invitation is addressed with unusual precision: all ye that labour and are heavy laden. Not the idle, not the finished, but the tired, mid-task, with the list still long. Christ does not wait for the work to be done before offering rest, which suggests the two were never meant to be sequential.
Rest, in his grammar, is not collapse and it is not escape. It is a gift with a giver, handed over in person: I will give you rest. The load is not argued away or declared imaginary; it is transferred. The only part left to us is the unclenching of the hands, and that, most days, is the hardest labour of all.
In Her Company
St Teresa of Ávila
The great reformer of Carmel taught that prayer is unhurried friendship with God. Let nothing disturb you, she wrote; all things are passing, and God never changes.
Teresa of Ávila (1515 to 1582) entered Carmel in Spain as a young woman and in midlife led its great reform, founding seventeen monasteries across the country. Her writings on prayer, among them The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection, remain foundational. In 1970 she became one of the first women declared a Doctor of the Church.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
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