Rest

Return to your rest, my soul,

for the Lord has been good to you

Psalm 116:7

Go back to where you know you belong, find again the place of inner peace. It is a place that can be found because God has been good to me. However it is out of reach unless I acknowledge the moral beauty of God's love for me. It is not found within alone, it is in submitting my feelings and experiences to the goodness of the Creator. My soul can only return to rest; rest cannot be found by searching for it or by exploration. As a disciple of Jesus I have already entered God's rest, it is my new dwelling place. It is the context in which I now live 

So there is a sence that my soul needs to return to the place in which it already dwells, to experience that which I already have. Rest is not a place that we go to, it is not a mental state which we seek to attain. Rest is not an absence of conflict, rest is not found internally or externally. Rest is found in a person

We don't seek rest for the first time we return to what we have known before, to the one we have known before. We return to a person, the Lord, who has been good to us

It is like coming home to a place I never should have left, to an awareness that was somehow always there but which I did not recognise 

Thomas Keating; Open Minds, Open Heart