The Hidden Link Between Humility and Rest: A Guide for Parents

Speaker A: 00:00:00

If you were to take a poll and ask people, how do you think God develops humility in us, you would probably get a range of answers. I'm guessing that one of those answers isn't going to be rest. But there is a very fascinating connection between humility and rest.

And not just humility, but other parts of our character. We're going to talk about that today and specifically how we can help our children to incorporate this into their own life.

Speaker B: 00:00:34

David, if your desire is to become spiritually stronger, emotionally healthier, and relationally smarter, you're at the right place. Speaker and writer Stephanie Smith inspires and equips you to achieve these three key aims.

If you are a parent, you, you also learn how to raise empowered kids. Ready for adulthood? Let's get started.

Speaker A: 00:00:58

I don't know in any parts of our culture, other than if they still do this in the military, that give out passes for r and r. And some people probably like, I don't even know, what do you mean by r and r? It's rest and recreation.

But, you know, we ought to be giving ourselves passes for this. And this is quite different than giving ourselves passes for laziness or just kind of zoning out, but genuine rest and recreation.

And this is something that is incredibly important for our kids. Now, if you've got little ones, and especially infants, you might be thinking, are you kidding me?

I know the value of sleep, mostly because I'm nothing, getting enough of it. I might not be getting hardly any of it. Trust me.

As the mama of five kids, including a set of twins, I understand about that dilemma of not having enough sleep when kids are young. And I hate to tell you this, if all your kids are still young, but you know what?

Sometimes when they get older, you have the same issue going on, but for different reasons. Maybe they're out and about and you're, you're up waiting for them to get home.

eat idea to call home it like: 1130

And that's when you learn to go back to those newborn days and you pry your eyes open and you say, of course, honey, what's going on in your life? And for other people, they wish they had that problem because they have an issue with insomnia.

And that can be a tremendously life altering and incapacitation that's very real. But while I'm talking today about sleep. I'm looking at this in a broader context of rest and recreation.

And if you're just tuned in, if you're kind of new to the podcast or new to our Thursday episodes that really focus on helping parents raise kids ready for adulthood, you might be coming in here going, okay, I don't know what this has to do with what you've been talking about over the last several weeks, which is, how do we teach our kids to develop a framework for living of the first two great commandments, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then later, as we get into the second, to love your neighbor as yourself. But stick with me because there is a tie in here.

Back in the very, very beginning, as in the beginning of creation and the world as we know it told to us in that Old Testament book of Genesis, God gave a directive by his example of rest. He created for six days, and then the Bible says he rested. Now, God was not fatigued and wiped out.

It wasn't like, oh, my gosh, I've been working for six weeks. I need a break. That wasn't the reason for his rest. God does not need sleep.

But he established for us a model to follow of having about one 7th of our. Of our life where we have an. A deliberate, intentional day of rest.

Now, it is important to clarify at the beginning here, rest is not the same thing as laziness, okay?

Somebody who's just zoned out on the couch, scrolling through their phone, Orlando through whatever is on the screen, and mention on, you know, a bunch of chips and, you know, and all that kind of stuff, that's not automatically something that we need to look at as rest. Rest is different for different people. For me, that type of activity would not be restful. It would be incredibly frustrating.

Okay, maybe not the snacking and potato chips part, but just, you know, like, to just have a whole day of being able to do nothing more than just lay on the stuff, I would not consider that restful whatsoever. So people do rest in different ways, and we want to make sure that we don't confuse style with substance.

But God has created in us as human beings an appetite for rest and also for play, for recreation.

You know, one of the aspects of childhood that we are now starting, thankfully, to hear more people address in our culture, is the harm that's done to children when they do not have enough free play. And this is something that is incredibly important. This is not just a matter of style, not like, oh, well, you parent your way, and I'll parent mine.

It impacts their brain development significantly.

And when we look at the fact that by the time a child is about the age of five, about 90% of their brain has reached the size that they will carry with it throughout their life. Now, we used to hear that, oh, you know, a child's going to learn 90% of what they're ever going to know by the time they're five.

And I'm thankful that that seems to have gone away. But that was quoted, you know, in the media, and that was just kind of sold as gospel truth for a lot of you.

And it was a distortion of the fact that, no, there's very difference between size of the brain and content in the brain, but there is brain development that does not occur unless children engage in free play. And free play is something that is different than a structured adult overseeing activity. And it's not just little kids who need play.

All of us, throughout our lives, need times of play. Basically, we need times of rest, and in a comprehensive way that includes sleep.

That includes not exerting ourselves physically all the time until we just totally wear our bodies out. But it also includes recreation. One of the best ways of doing that is getting out in nature.

Now, again, I want to be clear that there is a difference between style and substance.

But biologically, it is true that if a person gets out and walks through where there's a lot of trees, for example, trees clean the air, and a person actually will feel better and think better if they have walked through a forest or where there are a lot of trees, because the air there is, guess what? It's actually cleaner. And not only is getting outside and having activity out there, that's a about play and. And also just about rest.

And you know what? For some people, going out and working in a garden is restful. So again, I'm not. Don't, don't equate rest as being the absence of activity.

That isn't it. Rest and recreation is something that reduces our stress. It helps us to refocus, and it re energizes us. Now, sleep is also a part of rest.

And it's fascinating to me that sleep has. It's one of those aspects of our biology that very little is really understood about.

But one thing that we have discovered that happens in the brain during sleep is basically, you get brainwashed. Yep, that's really what happens.

There is a fluid that works its way through the channels between brain cells, and it removes the debris that has been built up in the brain through that day's activity. All energy in our body, even if it is mental activity, works at a cellular level.

And so as we go throughout the day and our activity and thoughts and all of those types of things, we are actually producing at a cellular level debris that accumulates in the brain and during sleep. And it doesn't just happen at any old part. I mean, it's. It has to happen at certain parts of our sleep and certain depths of our sleep.

Then there is a. Again, there's a cerebrospinal fluid that washes throughout our brain, and it removes that debris.

There is a biological reason why when you have a good night's sleep, we talk about, oh, you know, it's like I can think more clearly. It's like my mind cleared up. Well, actually, it did, because you were brainwashed. So if anybody ever asks you, you know, are you brainwashed?

You can say, well, I certainly hope so.

But again, we're talking about sleep here and one of the most important biological realities that we need to be an excellent steward of and requiring this for our children, setting these boundaries for them.

And then as they get older, establishing and teaching them about these boundaries so they will enact them for themselves when we are no longer in a position to oversee that. And that is the absence of screens during bedtime. Do not give your kid and don't let them have access to.

To a phone, a tablet, you know, a laptop that they have in their room with them all through the night. And if they're like, but I need an alarm clock, guess what?

You really can still buy those old fashioned kinds of implements that woke people up long before there were. There were cell phones. But it's true.

It's a biological fact that a lot of the light that these devices give off reduce and cut off melatonin, which is necessary for sleep, not to mention all the emotional and mental impact that it has, which can raise cortisol levels in the body, which can continue to keep a dopamine drip going on, all of which interferes with natural weight. So we have these physical realities, but in addition to these biological reasons, there's also these spiritual reasons.

And when we go back to the very beginning and that example that God set for us of resting on that 7th day, and then later, when he gave that in a commandment, one of the ten Commandments, which was to honor the Sabbath day, to set aside this day, that you would treat it differently than the other six days that you were to work.

It was also because we need to be able to refocus our perspective, our priority and having a dedicated time that we do, that is something that we will harm ourselves.

If we don't do that, not just at a physical level, but we will harm our character development, we will harm our relationship with God, and we will end up harming our relationship with other people.

And that harm might not come immediately, it might not come until where it really shows up for a long time down the road, but it is present, I think the fact that we need to sleep about a third, third of our lives. I mean, if you think about it, in a 24 hours period of time, the average person needs about 8 hours of sleep.

Children and adolescents often need a lot more. It's interesting for adolescents that their melatonin actually tends to kick in about an hour later than both children and adults.

And then after they go through adolescents adolescence and they're like around their mid twenties, then that begins to reset so that it kicks in a little earlier. So it's, your kids aren't just staying up late if they're an adolescent because they're trying to annoy you.

There's actually some biological factors that influence that.

But from a spiritual, mental, emotional, relational standpoint, the fact that God designed us knowing that all the needs that this world would have, why? Why make us so that we need to be asleep for a third of our lives? I mean, really, it's kind of like I have so many things I could be doing.

I have a lot of things I could be doing for you. And really, I need to spend about a third of my life like every single day just sleeping.

But I think there's something about that that is a connection to creating humility, that we realize that we don't have all the strength that we need to just run for as long as we want. There is something about our need for sleep that reminds us we are limited people.

We have limits to what we can do physically, and we can be wise to use that, to be reminded that we are limited in other aspects of our lives as well. We are both incredibly resilient and strong, and yet we are also an incredibly vulnerable and needy creation.

And sometimes as christians, we can get so worked up thinking that we have so many things that God has told us to do and called us to do, and we better be doing that. We don't recognize and we don't really value that. God has also said yes.

And along with that, you need rest, you need time to recover, you need time to focus, to be renewed, to have your creativity restored to you. You know, humility is one of those things that protects our capacity.

People without humility can be incredibly skilled people and have tremendous abilities, but at some point in time, if they don't have humility that goes along with those capacities, they will end up diminishing those capacities or using them to a bad end, being that we need to understand about limitations and sleep and rest is a way for that. Now, again, I'm not just talking about sleep here.

I'm also talking about an attitude of creating time in our lives where we step away from the normal routines and demands of life, and we do that regularly, which is why God said, hey, this isn't just something you're supposed to do once a year or once every month. It's like, no sleep's going to happen every day and a Sabbath rest is going to happen every week.

In other words, you can't go too terribly long without having these things present in your life. If you're going to live aligned with the way that I have designed you to live, which is the way to thrive.

And we see one of the examples of this in the Old Testament when the Israelites had had left Egypt, and they're wandering around in the desert there because they kind of made some pretty bad choices, and God is still present with them.

And even though they grumbled and complained, and that grumbling and complaining had been what led them to wandering, wandering around for 40 years and missing out on what God had actually wanted them to have, God was still present.

And one of the ways in which he was present is he shows up six days out of the week and he drops divine food right outside their doors for them, okay? Doordash is nothing new, all right? God instituted that centuries ago.

All people had to do was they had to get up, they had to walk outside their tent, they had to get their baskets, and they just had to pick up the fresh manna that was on the ground. This was definitely organic. It was vegan. It was probably high in protein, fiber, minerals, and vitamins.

Whether it was gluten free or not, I don't know.

But what we do know was that this was provided daily, and every person was supposed to go out and, and collect about three liters for each person in, in their home. But on the 6th day, God said, you're going to get enough for today and tomorrow. Now, the other days of the week.

So days one through five, people were told, you only get what you need for today. And some people were kind of like, yeah, I think I'll kind of go do my own thing here.

And they would go out and they would get enough for it that day and the next day. And every time that they did that, they would go in and the next day they would open up and guess what they would find? They would find worms.

And that it was, I mean, God was pretty serious about, you need to obey what I'm telling you in these very simple instructions.

If you're not going to pay attention and follow me, when it comes to just walking at your door and picking up, you know, your food for the day off of the ground, I'm not going to be able to trust that you're going to follow me and my commandments and things that are far more serious than this. But on the 6th day, he said, I want you to go ahead and you collect for two days. And when you open it up on the 7th day, guess what?

It will be worm free. Why was that? Because that 7th day was designed to be a day of rest. And God was like, hey, the divine delivery is closed on the Sabbath.

And what we see by the time that Jesus shows up on earth and human and God form is that the Sabbath had been entirely corrupted. And people had added so many restrictions to that over the years that it was no longer a day of rest. It was kind of a day of panic.

Like, am I doing enough? Am I doing too little? I mean, am I, am I allowed to, like, walk my animal and get them to drink, you know, using a rope or not?

Or, I mean, whatever it was, I mean, there were just so many different ways that people were thrown into a panic. Panic and rest do not tend to go together. Have you ever noticed that?

And we want to be mindful in our lives that as we are intentionally cultivating habits and practices of rest, of recreation for us and for our children, whatever their ages are, that, number one, we are intentional about this. Again, this isn't just like, oh, this is a nice idea.

It's like, no, this goes back to the very beginning when God modeled this, and it's also talked about in the ten commandments. And yes, I know that we no longer live under the mosaic law in a lot of respects, but this principle of rest predates the mosaic law.

ss, the necessity of rest. In: 2017

Twelve scientific reasons it works.

And so even science shows that people perform better, they live longer, and they are happier when rest and recreation are a regular part of their so as parents, whether your children are two or whether they are twelve or they are 16, incorporate in your family practices regular rest and recreation. Model that for them and then establish the structure so that it becomes part of their life.

You can't just tell them, hey, someday when you grow up, you know, you need to do this. You're going to have to build that framework internally within them as you implement these practices in your own life and in your home.

You know, sometimes it's easy to only think in terms of where we can so over spiritualize certain things that just being able to get good sleep, taking regular time for rest and recreation can seem like, well, what does that really have to do with the christian life? But it has everything to do with it. Because the gospel is not just about getting us saved so that we have a path to heaven when we die.

The gospel is about living and thriving and stepping into a relationship with God and a relationship with ourselves and a relationship with others as we have been designed to be. And we are physical creatures. We're not just spirits and souls. We are housed in a body that God designed and he wants us to honor.

And our physical bodies as well as our minds, our souls, our spirit, our strength, all of those things that Jesus said we want to love God with comes back and includes this principle of rest and recreation. All right, my friend, that's going to wrap us up here for today.

And I just want to remind you, if you haven't already, go to the website stephaniepresents.com and look up. You can look up speaking engagements that I have there and also sign up for the weekly newsletter hi impact. You're going to get information.

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Speaker B: 00:24:41

Thank you for listening.

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