”
Rest
is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a
summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds
float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time
“
I can’t count how many times over the last year I’ve advised people, discussed the finer points of, and given talks on the subject of slowing down. Our culture is one that rules our life by the clock, judges it by the number of our accomplishments, and in the end demands more hours of us than there are in a day. We weren’t made for this pace. God not only gave us a day for rest and worship, He made it a commandment that we keep it. And in my experience, not a single commandment of God’s is ever with the reasoning of ‘Because I said so.’ Everything that He has ever told us to do results in the betterment of ourselves and our world. How we’ve gone about enforcing those commandments is another story, but that’s a debate for another day. The fact is God created us with a need for down time, for rest; probably so we could stop and enjoy life instead of just running through it.
In my need to get so many things done, raise this amount of money, get these papers in, buy this gear, and spend x amount of time with the people I’m going to miss, I have done nothing for the last month or two except work, run errands, and try to squish in time with friends. Until today – today I rediscovered waiting for tea.
In Morocco they have many traditions centered around the drinking of their sweet tasting mint tea, which in my opinion is one of the greatest drinks in the history of mankind, perhaps second only to Mango con Leche (mango with milk) in Costa Rica. One of those traditions is drinking it from small adorned glasses with no handles, which are also not much thicker than a normal glass, unlike our coffee mugs, and so you don’t have any insulation between the heat of the scalding tea and your fingers. Now, you may ask why one would want to hold a scalding glass of tea in bare fingers? Why wouldn’t they at least put handles on these cups? I answer both questions with another question: why would you want to place in your mouth something that is too hot to hold in your hands? Seems the arabs were thinking ahead of the rest of us yet again. The tea is brewed in the pot, as it involves several ingredients aside from just tea leaves, meaning there is nothing to stir in your cup so you can’t cool it that way or pass time doing so. You can’t raise it to your mouth to test it’s heat every few seconds, because without a handle you can’t really hold it until it’s cool enough anyway. And if you’re wanting to have some tea, you don’t want to pour it and leave it sitting out on the table while you do something else, because you will inevitably forget about it and come back when it’s cold. So there are really only two practical options – talk with others, which is the central idea behind the serving of Moroccan tea, or in the solo case I found myself in today, sit and wait.
I chose to do so in an open air setting, sitting on the front deck, listening to birds and wind and occassionally a distant car, and just soaking up the beauty that is t
he lower mainland. After my cup of tea, I poured another, so I could just sit awhile longer. An hour or two later, I’d finished the pot, and couldn’t remember feeling more centered and at peace in a long time. God certainly knows best – taking this kind of time once a week, for a whole day, just might be what our stress addicted culture needs.
