Lately, I have learned a lot about finding rest and what that actually means. In our culture today everyone wants to be the best and will do whatever it takes to get there, no matter what that means for their health. This is not how we are meant to live our lives. As a second-year student at the University of Virginia, I see people every day who are overworking themselves to become successful but in reality that is not how we will become successful. I am not saying that we don't have to work hard, but we don't have to work ourselves to exhaustion.
College campuses are very broken places with so many people believing that how hard they work and how much they accomplish is directly tied to their worth. This is NOT true. Our worth is not dependent on all of the material things we earn throughout lie. Our worth is not dependent on the people we know. Our worth is not dependent on whether we got that cool internship or not. Our worth is found in how we rest in God and let Him have control of all of the things we think we have to do to be successful.
All of the work we do is supposed to come from rest.
God took care of our greatest need, so we should be able to trust Him enough to take care of our day-to-day needs. When we don't rest, we forget three very important things about God - that He is the point of our lives, that He is the provider for our lives, and that He is the savior of our lives. We were all created to serve different purposes in life, but God is the reason that we have what we have to work for and when we don't rest in Him we are straying away from the promises He gave us.
When we find ourselves working while we are resting then we are apart from Christ, whereas when we are with Christ we can rest while we are working. We run for the glory of God, and part of this is knowing when to stop and just rest. What this all means is that we have to be fully committed to Jesus, or our religion will become more tiring than restful.
You will get that internship. You will get the grades you want. You will get so much more in life if you give it the Lord and stop overworking yourself. So just take a break and get some rest.
