Mornings with Eric and BrigitteA family who prays together, stays together. AND a family who rests together gets emotionally healthy. On Thursday's Mornings with Eric and Brigitte, Pastor and therapist, Keith Case talks about the Power of Rest for families as we head into the summer months.
It's 809. You're listening to mornings with Eric and Bridget here on Moody Radio South Florida 89.3 minus Eric today. But, Jill, you and I must need this message of rest. Oh, I so need this conversation.
I tend to pack as much into my day as I possibly can. If I see I've got 15 minutes here, here's what I can do. I've got a half hour here. Here's what I can do. Even on vacation, I plan an itinerary of what we're going to do just so we get everything in that we want to. But just this past weekend, John and I took off and just spent some time literally in the ocean and on the beach and at the pool, and it felt so good. Rest is needed, isn't it?
Oh, it is so needed now. I tend to be the opposite of that. Hopefully not too opposite. I like to get things done, but I'm. I am really intentional about rest because I can't function if I'm like stressed out. If I'm overbooked, I can't function. I just don't like how that feels in my body, literally and in my mind and my spirit. So I'm really intentional and I'm thankfully my husband is as well that especially on the weekends now during the week. It's been a crazy week already, but on the weekends we're like, okay, where can and how can we rest? How can we rejuvenate? Because I just can't function if I don't. Yeah. Pastor Keith Case is joining us. Yeah.
I mean, I heard you guys talking earlier. Uh, the term masonboro. I had never heard that before until this year. Right.
I think it is a new term this year.
Is it a new term? Right. So, uh, you know, we got to stay hot on these topics in these terms, but my my daughter, our oldest daughter, she just graduated from high school, and last week we had three events just for that one daughter. And we have five kids. So by the end of the week, I was like, done. And we had we had like 80 kids at our house on Friday or Saturday night.
Oh, that will stress you out.
Yeah. For her graduation party and, um, and then I had to get up and preach on Sunday morning, Sunday night. So I was, you know, I'm like, man, I need this message as well, right?
Yeah. Well, thankfully, you're here to give it. So, Pastor Keith, you've been with us as we've been going through this series of really creating a flourishing life, we've looked at the arts and creativity and appreciating that in our world we've looked at a work and how we view it. But rest? Why would rest be important to our flourishing life?
Yeah. Oh, it's so it's so important, you know, um, it's it's also one of those things that I find people have a hard time doing. Right. Um, because sometimes they see it as a thing of laziness, or they see it as a sign of weakness, or they see it as something that could, like, lead to complacency in their life. And, you know, it makes sense because you go running and you get tired and you need to rest. So but it can seem like you're giving up, you know. Um, and so in Scripture, though, Scripture gives a very different story about rest. And it actually says rest is the most like potent thing we can do as far as giving life back to us and giving life to us. Um, so it's become one of those things that, for me, I've had to learn to do in my life. And there's there's multiple reasons for it. Um, and that is because of some of the, the stories and lies that are out there in our culture that we believe, you know, that get in, get into our own stories, you know.
Yeah. It's so true. I mean, I think about, you know, hustle culture and you've got to grind and you've got to make it to the top and you've got to, you know, if you're going to be the best, you've got to do what other people aren't willing to do. And obviously some of that is true, but we take it to maybe an extreme and a wrong way where we're thinking we've got to work 18, 20 hour days to get ahead.
Yeah. And I think even too, on top of those narratives, we have the realities of life now in South Florida, where everybody I know is working 2 to 3 jobs. And I'm talking not just not just like middle class people or people like myself, but like people who are like upper class people because everybody feels like if they don't, they're getting behind. You know.
That's really a good point. But there's an opposite, too, because you said, you know, you might feel like you're being lazy if you take time, but there is such a thing as, okay, now you've rested for a reason. Now it's time to get busy.
Right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, to get to get restored.
In our life. You know, I, I think that word rests sometimes we we also think of it in the word of restoration. Right. And when you think about restoring, for example, a house, you might think, oh, that's a lot of work, you know, that goes in and that doesn't feel very restful. But the point is that for us to have restoration in our life, we have to have rest. We have to be reset, and we have to take time to do that so that we can be engaged. Laziness is really what happens to people when they're in burnout culture, right? They're in hustle culture and they don't know how to rest. And this doesn't just happen out in the workforce. It happens in the church. I mean, it's something that we are actively in our church working on. Um, even this week we were having meetings about this. It's like, how do we create sustainability? How do we create a culture where we're working out of our rest in Christ instead of, you know, working to try to earn or prove something. Um, so this is really, really important stuff.
I feel like it's almost even more common in the church because in ministry life you're like, well, I'm doing this for God, so I've got to keep going, right? I mean, if I don't do this, you know, if I don't go to this ministry event, if I don't go out and do this, then you know, someone's going to miss out on God as if God needs us, right?
Yes. And so I work with a lot of pastors as a therapist. Right. And I work with business leaders and, you know, getting into business leaders lives and stuff. You get into these narratives like a performance narrative. I only matter in this life based on what I can accomplish. That's one narrative. Another narrative we might carry from our family is I'm the martyr. I have to carry it all on my back. Um, and there's multiple other ones, like independence. It's all about me. I can't trust anybody. But I run into these business leaders, and as we unpack their stories, they start seeing these narratives are really driving them, and they can help them to accomplish a lot in life, right? The problem is they can never turn it off. Like when they get to 30 and 40, they can't turn it off and they still hear the narrative in their head. And I tell them, it's kind of like the coach in your head who tells you when you're at football practice, get up, you loser. You know you can't be a loser. Get up. Keep going. Um. They're just trying to, like, relax and be with their family. And these are the kinds of things that are going through their head, and they've allowed them or kind of pushed them or driven them to be highly successful in a way or very driven people, but then they can't turn it off. What makes it even more challenging for pastors is you wrap it in this spirituality of like, well, I'm doing this for Jesus, so how can I turn it off? You know.
And yet Jesus himself demonstrated God himself demonstrated Sabbath rest. So it must be important, right?
Yeah. And that's one of the things that hit me, um, you know, this past week, just even preparing to come on with you guys was, um, the first thing that's called holy in the entire Bible is the Sabbath. It's the day of rest. And it's so important because, you know, Exodus tells us it's important because God did it. We need to do it. It's a part of how he made us being made in the image of God. It's not a weakness. It's a part of our makeup. It's hardwired into our DNA as a reflection of who God is. That we were made to rest. Um, it's also part of our formation in that we do it because it reminds us that we once were slaves, and now we've been set free. Um, in the Christian, the Christian narrative, you know, in the Hebrew Scriptures, it went from we worked to finally rest. But now that day has shifted to we start the day rest or start the week resting on Sunday. It's the first day of the week. And out of resting in what Christ has accomplished for us, that's how we go into work.
We're talking with Pastor Keith Case about the power of rest and why it's so necessary in our lives. And so tell us about your story, your wrestle with this because you talked about this is something you had to learn to do.
Oh, it's it's such a thing I've had to learn to do. And two examples of that. One is when we moved to West Palm Beach, we had planted a church here called Providencia. I know a lot of times I talk about Memorial Perez, and that's how I'm kind of identified here. But I also have a church plant that we started. It's nine and a half years old, and about two years in we got some accolades. We got recognized on a website, uh, as like a church plant in South Florida that was like doing awesome stuff. We got a huge grant. We got about $50,000 grant per year for four years. And then the church we were renting from said, you can be here forever, so great wins. You know, like huge. I felt kind of excited, you know, encouraged that day. And I woke up the next morning and I was depressed and I was overwhelmed. And thank God I had a session with a counselor later on, my therapist, and we just processed it and he said, what did you hear with all those accolades and that affirmation? And I said, I heard, now go prove it. You know, now you got to go do more. Um, and he said, man, that's not what I heard at all. Keith. I heard them saying, oh my gosh, it's amazing who you are, who you've become, and the work you're doing. Um, and in fact, like, we want you to be able to rest in this. You have a home now for your church. We've given you money so you don't have to be stressed about that. We're actually promoting you so you don't have to worry about getting the word out so much. And yet I'm taking it as like more weight on me. So I really had to look into my own story around rest. It wasn't a thing that happened very often in my house. We worked really hard as kids, and the only time you saw anybody rest was really when they were exhausted. And so that's not a good model if you want to be a healthy pastor, right? Because as a pastor in particular, I see a lot of pastors with, you know, moral failure and different things that happen. And I've always said, man, I really want to be caring for my soul to try to mitigate some of that stuff. You know, um, the other the other thing was for my wife and I, we were so poor early on that if we ever went on vacation, it was always with family and we love our families. But that's not always restful, right? And then when you go with your kids, there's the whole joke of it's not vacation, it's a trip. Especially when you have five of them. So we had to really sit down and and think about how do we do vacation. I thought, because it's summertime, right? People are going to have the opportunity to go on vacation, and they may have already picked where they're going. And, you know, some things may already be organized for them in that way. But I thought at least they could take some time and have intention with their spouse or whoever it is they're going on vacation with to really think about that. Um, how do I really rest on vacation? How do I find restoration?
Let's talk about that was because you talk about summer vacation as a practice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it's, you know, maybe you get to go on a couple of weekend vacations over the summer. You get one week off or I don't, I don't know what people's schedules are, but, um, for my wife and I, we had to literally sit down and plan vacation. Not, as you know, Jill was talking about like a schedule, a calendar. We do that, but really starting more with like, what do we need? That was the question. What do we need? We are both in ministry. Uh, we're we get burned out a lot of times, or you can get burned out in that space. So like when we get away, it's not like we need to go and be caring for other people. We need to be able to, to to disconnect a little bit from that responsibility. And um, so we had to like really think about that. And his little simple things, like we needed to go to a place that had like good air for me, air quality because I have bad allergies. Um, we've early on we'd go to places that were cheap and it was like, you know, the air conditioning or whatever was dirty and there was mold. And, you know, it's just not a good thing. You're getting sick when you're trying to go on vacation. Um, but but also like building in what are the things that are restorative to my wife and I, uh, what are the things that are restorative to our kids? So we build in like time just to be still in the morning. Like just to be quiet. Just to be still. Uh, we build in, like, we're going to go for a walks at night. Um, just the things for us that helped us when we came back from vacation, we felt, ah, I feel so good. I mean, how many times have you come back from vacation feeling that way?
Right. You need a vacation from the vacation, right? Yeah. And it's so. I love that you're saying they talk about it because sometimes people rest differently. They, you know, they they feel rejuvenated in different ways. So to talk about that so you can build something together where okay, you get what you need here. But on this day, can we go pick seashells if that's what I want to do?
Exactly. Yeah. And you can do stuff separately, right? So I mean, one of the things for me is like, when I go on vacation, I feel like finally I can care for myself the way I want to care for myself. And people might laugh at this, but going running is like a way I feel rested.
Oh, I wish I felt rested, going, running.
I know, I know, but it's like I feel like I'm caring for myself and it's like, ah, there's this rest that comes for me because I'm like, oh, I'm caring for my I'm eating like the healthiest I can eat, right? It's that I have the bandwidth and the time and the margin in my life on vacation to kind of create this life that I'm like, ah, I really am doing a good job of caring for myself here. And then, well, I said, it's an experiment is like you can start building those things back into our lives when we come home.
Yeah, like you said, because it doesn't have to be just when we're on vacation. It can be, um, in our daily lives. You talk about even stretching is helpful and intentional connection. Talk about how we can build those into daily life.
Yeah. I mean, that's this past week. My, um, there's a lady from our church who teaches yoga, and I'm with my son and my, uh, youngest son, my oldest and my youngest son. And we're sitting there doing, like, yin yin yoga. Maybe I'm saying it wrong, but it's literally like you're taking a nap for an hour. I mean, that's what it felt like. It just felt like we were like we did like five stretches and. And the whole time the woman is talking about the compassion, being compassionate with our bodies, being kind to ourselves. I mean, she's just preaching to me as a pastor, you know? I'm like, my body is like one of the things that gets neglected the most. And because I'm doing all these things and but just to care for my body. And I always remember Eric saying, you know, we we have such a hard time seeing our bodies as the temple, right? The way that God calls our bodies a temple. But to take this intentional time to care for ourselves is so important. And I I'm very unflexible. So for me to just spend time stretching is like, it's a very healthy thing for me.
And yeah, go ahead.
Well, Pastor Cates, I love what you say too. It's kind of a rehumanization like remembering who God created us to be. Talk about that.
Yeah, I love that. Jesus invites us when he says, you know, come to me, all who are weary and and and I'll give you rest. Right. Um, the the, the when we go back to that Genesis narrative and we see Adam and Eve kind of reaching up to become like God and this, this insecurity of I have to be more than a human being. And then we see Jesus coming down and taking on human flesh and saying, no, this is cool. Like he he lifts the shame of the human experience and says, this is what I've made you to be. Let me be God and you get to be human and embrace the human experience. Don't try to become more than a human being. And I've found so much rest just in that invitation, because so much of the things that are burning me out and exhausting me are narratives that Jesus never gives me. The ones that Jesus gives me are, you know, come to me all who are weak and weary and be restored. You know, be restored like we are so busy guys, right? We're so busy as a culture here. And you go anywhere else. I know you just got back from Turkey, and when people when you go to other cultures, there's so much more relational. Their sense of time is so different. And in many ways, it's more biblical than than what we're doing here, because we are so hustle, hustle, and we don't even know it.
And we don't even know it. So what is your closing word and encouragement to us on this topic?
Yeah, I think just for, for, for as a community, you know, if we can take the time as we look into the summer and think about vacation and say, man, what what would it look like for me to live in to Jesus's words on vacation? Come to me all who are weak and weary, and I will give you rest. That our vacation could be restorative, and then we could take some of that stuff back into our lives that we're really learning to care for ourselves and find rest throughout our week. Instead of thinking that it's all about go, go, go. So I can get, get, get. It's it's really learning to rest and receive him.
And he invites us into that.
Invites us.
Into it in Sabbath and rest and restoration. Pastor Keith, thank you so much for joining us.
