During your lifetime, your heart will beat 2.5 billion times and pump more than 1 million barrels of blood throughout your body. But between each powerful beat, your heart rests. This resting period allows the heart to reload—to do the work of the next beat. With each beat, our hearts teach us the importance of respecting natural rhythms—the necessity to balance work and rest.
Kathy Grace, a Christian nurse in the AdventHealth cardiac lab, compares our need for rest to the heart rhythm. “When we take care of patients,” Kathy says, “we always give them an electrocardiogram [EKG], an electrical recording of the heart. It shows us the heart rhythm, or heartbeat, which is the very basis of what we do. I like to compare the heartbeat to how the Lord made us. Each waveform is a heartbeat, and the line that separates each beat is a time of rest. This is the way our lives work as well. We can have a very active day, and then we need a time of rest. We need sleep in order to stay healthy.”
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28
SPIRITUAL THOUGHT
Like our beating hearts, you and I need time to rejuvenate. We need rest. Overstimulated organs eventually flat-line and shut down. Take time regularly—daily, weekly and yearly—for rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation.
MY PRAYER
Lord, please help me to follow your pattern for rest so that I may feel whole each and every day.
