I love this passage from the book Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman.
How do you view pauses in your life?
Many of us struggle with the thought of pausing as part of the natural order of the day. It seems counterintuitive, counterproductive, and maybe just plain wrong. That is why I love the wording in this quote. I have read plenty on rest, daily rhythms, and Sabbath, but the imagery of comparing us literally with machinery works. We struggle with the balance of identity in relation to our work, until our motion becomes our identity.
Our identity is so much more. In fact, it is when we realize that our work is impacted greatly by how we honour our whole person, and that of the other humans around us, that we actually become purposeful. Our purpose is a key foundational aspect of identity, so if we create our sense of purpose on the foundation of what we can do, we get lost in the machinery.
Work is one part of our outward display of wholeness as a person. Pausing causes us to remember this truth.
Lead Freely 