Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first painted a still, lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second created on canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam; and at the fork of the branch, almost wet with the cataract's spray, sat a robin on its nest. The first was stagnation; the last was rest, writes Drummond. Rest is not a sedative for the sick, but a tonic for the strong. It spells emancipation, illumination and transformation.
Our world is made up of vivid contrasts. There is the arid, barren, desert and there is the luxuriant oasis with waving palms. There are breathtaking mountain heights and there are the monotonous plains. Stagnation is to remain in a place that takes us nowhere. To choose to be like a lone lake is to refuse to grow and to move up to the next level. Mrs Charles Cowman says, when our spiritual garments are threadbare, our existence becomes as fruitless as the desert wastes. We dry up; our wandering is aimless; we live on the margin of life.
To live like the robin on a thundering waterfall, perched on the fork of a bent branch of a tree seems precarious and calculated to make us anxious, restless and fretful. If we image our lives as forever hanging on a precipice, we will remain afraid and unable to move forward. But if we image our nests, which are secure and protected perches we can rest on in the midst of life, we will move with the confidence and assurance that life is safe but it must in the end be all about spiritual growth.
Assurance and confidence can come from learning to give. Often they come from receiving, which is an art. Receiving the limitless grace of God enables us to set our sails by the eternal in what seems to us a mysterious, constantly changing and fathomless sea. It seems life is like a trackless ocean, vast and impersonal, moving on and on. Grace reminds us that the hand of God keeps track of us on trackless paths.
Receiving needs no genius, no goodness, only want. Our real needs and wants are not those that are most apparent to us.
The conditions we believe we need to grow are often not the conditions which promote true growth.
A monk who needed oil planted an olive sapling. Then he prayed for gentle showers for its tender roots, then for the sun to warm it and then for the frost to brace its tissues. He was puzzled to find the tree sparkling with frost but lifeless at the end and unable to supply his needs. In life, too, we lay down so many conditions that we are unable to grow spiritually.
The monk's brother housed in another cell had also planted a tree, but prayed for it to thrive and entrusted it and what it needed to God. The tree thrived because God supplied its needs knowing better than the monk all that it truly needed to survive.
We are painting our life sketches and planting our life trees. Some of us choose stagnation, others growth. If we remain caught up in super-ficialities, we finally stagnate. We have to go beyond and look for the truly abiding hidden in the surface turmoil and cries of the battlefield to discover true rest. We cannot paint both pictures at the same time. We choose either life or death.