Rest Is Holy

Hey Love!

I want to tell you about my Aunt Net today.

Aunt Net was my grandmother's sister. She was the original. Long before anybody used the word authentic, Aunt Net was already living it. She taught me how to move as myself. Not as a performance of myself. Not as an edited version anybody could approve of. Herself.

She did not take anything off of anybody. Not disrespect. Not a raised voice. Not somebody trying to make her small so they could feel big. She would look a person dead in the eye and say what needed saying, and then she would go on about her day.

And she loved people. All kinds of people. Wide open. Aunt Net did not sort folks into categories before deciding whether they deserved her kindness. She just loved them.

But she loved hard without taking people too seriously, and that is its own kind of wisdom. She carried a full day of responsibility and still found something funny in the middle of it. The humor was not a mask she put on to get through the day. It was how she stayed herself underneath all that weight.

And she did not hold grudges. Do not mistake that for a short memory though. Aunt Net would let something go, and then months later, right in the middle of a laugh, she would look at you sideways and let you know she still remembered. She forgave you. She was just not going to pretend it never happened.

Looking back, I think that fun was the closest thing to rest she gave herself. A joke in the middle of a hard day. A little sideways look instead of a lecture. She never called it rest. It was the only version she let herself have.

I loved her too. I still do. But I have to tell you the truth about her, because the truth is the whole reason I am writing this newsletter today.

She worked too hard.

I come from a long line of women who worked hard. Women who got up before the sun and lay down long after it. Women who carried whole households, whole families, whole communities on their backs and called it nothing because that is just what you do. Aunt Net was one of them. My grandmother was one of them. I am one of them.

Somebody taught every one of us how to work.

Nobody taught any of us how to REST.

Not one lesson. Not one example I could point to and say, that. Do that. I got a masterclass in endurance and not one single class on stopping.

So here is what I want to say to you plain, because I believe it with everything in me.

Rest is holy.

Not a reward you earn after the list is finished. Not something soft or lazy or less than. Holy. Set apart. Sacred enough that God built it into creation on purpose and then commanded His people to keep it.

God says:

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. You shall labor six days, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. You shall not do any work in it." Exodus 20:8-10

Read that again. He did not suggest it. He commanded it. Rest was not an afterthought in the plan. It was written into the plan on purpose, the same as the work was.

Aunt Net never got that memo, and neither did the women who raised me, and if I am honest, for a long time neither did I.

But I am done inheriting what nobody meant to pass down.

If you come from a line of women like mine, hear me. You can honor everything they poured into you and still refuse the one thing they never got to put down. You can carry their strength without carrying their exhaustion. Those are not the same inheritance, and you get to choose which one you keep.

This is the whole reason I built what I built. My books and my courses are not just something to read. They are your training classes on REST. The classes nobody in my family ever got to take. The ones I am building now so you do not have to learn it the hard way, in your seventies, looking back and wishing somebody had told you sooner.

Somebody is telling you now.

Rest is holy. Take the class.

• Release and Reclaim. Let go of what was never yours to carry in the first place, and take back what is.

• Explore and Establish. Get curious about who you are underneath all that doing, and build something solid there.

• Shape and Shift. Let your rest take a shape that actually fits your real life, not somebody else's idea of what rest should look like.

• Transform and Thrive. Let the rest change you, not just refresh you for more of the same.

A Few Things People Have Asked Me

"Isn't it disrespectful to say my elders got something wrong?"

No. Honoring somebody and correcting course are not opposites. Aunt Net taught me how to be myself and how to love people well. I am building on what she gave me, not throwing it away. I am just adding the one class she never had access to.

"What if resting feels selfish to me?"

It felt that way to the women who raised you too, and it cost them. Feeling selfish is not the same thing as being selfish. Let the feeling pass through and rest anyway.

"Where do I actually start?"

Start with the She Rested book. It is the training class in book form, and it meets you exactly where you are, tired and all.

Prayer:

God, thank You for every woman who worked hard so I could stand here today. Forgive me for the seasons I called their exhaustion a virtue. Teach me what Aunt Net never got to learn. Make my rest holy the way You always meant it to be. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Ready to take the class Aunt Net never got to take? Start with She Rested.