When You’re Too Busy to Rest

In this episode of the Infinitely Precious Podcast, James reflects on the quiet illusion that rest is something we earn once life finally slows down. Drawing from a recent personal experience of choosing rest on a day that felt far too full, he explores how busyness often disguises itself as responsibility, virtue, or even love. Rather than offering productivity tips or solutions, this episode invites listeners to consider rest as an act of trust—an honest acknowledgment of our limits and a gentle return to what it means to be human. With compassion and openness, James reminds us that we are not held together by our overfunctioning, and that rest, even in small moments, is a gift we do not have to earn.

Creators and Guests

Host

James Henry

What is Infinitely Precious?

Everyone is infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift they already are. Through affirmation and practice, each of us can begin to live from a place of recognizing our own preciousness and its extension in to everyone and everything else.

Intro: 00:00

Welcome to the infinitely precious podcast produced by infinitely precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

James: 00:12

Hello, beloved. It's me, James, and it's good to be with you for another opportunity to share some thoughts. I've enjoyed this journey we've been on. It's been just a little bit over a year since I began this podcast, the Infinitely Precious podcast in earnest. And since that time, a number of things have changed in my life.

James: 00:42

And those changes have kept me on the go, busy, if you would. And so it seemed like a good thing to do today to talk about resting. Most of us, don't reject rest as something that we need to do. It's just something we postpone after I get this one thing done or once things slow down or when I've earned the chance to take a rest. It becomes something that's conditional upon, you know, completing some other set of requirements that we've imagined for ourselves.

James: 01:29

And they really are imagined. And the challenge becomes too that busyness often disguises itself in our life as being responsible as a virtue showing how productive we could be, or even love. It masquerades those things without really being those things. We don't usually say, I don't need rest. We usually just say, not today.

James: 02:02

So, yesterday was one of those days for me. I talked at the beginning of the podcast a little bit about how I you know, a lot of things have changed. And one of the things that's changed for me is I moved from being the pastor of one church to the pastor of being a new church. Let me first say that I love the new church I serve. It is a bit bigger and it's a bit more busy.

James: 02:28

There are more things that need my attention, more people I haven't quite met yet that I'm still working on getting to know, and a number of tasks that require my attention. When you add all of that up, it feels like my schedule can become kind of full. I try to be careful about choosing what I can fit in and how much I can fit in in a given week. But there come times when, particularly we're in January, about just almost mid January, and we just came out of one of the busiest seasons of the year. And yesterday afternoon is which is Monday afternoon.

James: 03:18

I'm recording this on a Tuesday afternoon. This drops on Wednesdays. Monday afternoon is usually the time when I've begun to put together the kinds of things I want to talk about. And so Monday afternoon becomes the time I record both the Infinitely Precious podcast and the Doolin weekly podcast, which are two podcasts I do on a weekly basis. I sit down and I do the recordings, do some editing, and then I drop them for different days of the week.

James: 03:52

Yesterday afternoon, after a very busy morning in the office, I came home as planned for the afternoon, maybe about a half an hour later than I had planned. And I usually set aside about a three hour window of time to do the recording, the editing, the uploading, the summarizing, all the little tiny pieces that go with the Infinitely Precious podcast and the Dylan weekly podcast. And yesterday I came home and I sat in my what I call my spiritual chair. It's just a comfortable chair where I sit every morning to do my morning meditation. And I thought to myself, you know what I really need this afternoon before I do anything else is another meditative sit.

James: 04:46

I just need to let go of things, bring myself back to center, to grounding, if you will, to just let go and be present. So that's what I did. I sat in that chair with things pressing in on the schedule and pressing in on needing to get these things done, knowing that it was just forty eight hours before this dropped, less than forty eight hours before the Infinitely Precious podcast dropped. I realized that what I really needed was that moment of meditation. Now, I do about a twenty minute sit, twenty one minutes give or take.

James: 05:30

And after I finished that twenty one minute sit there in the chair, I decided to give myself the rest of the afternoon. As busy as I was, as much as was in my schedule, I've got a few added things in this week's schedule that aren't usually there. I gave myself the rest of that afternoon to just sit in my chair, to drink a cup of coffee, to look out the window, to do some reading and some journaling, and just be present in that moment. And it was deeply needed. I didn't even know how deeply needed it was until I actually did it.

James: 06:18

I was really in my own mind too busy to take a break, too busy to rest. And what my spirit and my body told me was to rest. And after I had kind of centered it became clear that I needed to rest even more than I had imagined it before. There was no time for the rest and yet I took the rest. And sometimes that is the time we read we need the rest the most.

James: 06:54

In those moments when there isn't time for it, when we are invited instead to choose it anyway. I didn't rest because everything was finished. I rested because I wasn't finished. And that was the point. That I needed to be there.

James: 07:16

That when I do this podcast I want to be as fully available to open myself up as much as I can to share whatever comes up within in a way that feels unblocked and real. And I didn't have it in me yesterday. It changed my perspective. The whole rest of the evening felt more rested and relaxed and by the time I went to bed last night I was ready to give myself permission to have taken rest, to lay down all my concerns. Sometimes the busyness of my life carries over into the way I sleep at night.

James: 08:00

It takes a little bit longer. Recently, for a long time didn't bother me at all. There was a period in my life when it did and then as I began a meditation practice, I began to let go of it and it was fine. But more recently, things have come to visit me as I was falling off to sleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night. Last night as I laid down, my only mantra to myself a few times before I went to sleep was I've done all I can do.

James: 08:30

I lay down the things that aren't done. Whatever is undone will either get done tomorrow or not done at all. And that's okay. I am limited and those limits are okay. Now, the reason why I chose to talk about this in coming to the podcast is because if you're anything like me, you find yourself in the same place.

James: 08:55

There are so many things calling out to you that need to be done. And you feel like you'll have time for rest if you can just complete this list. But the list never quite gets done because as quickly as you can check some things off, some more things get added. So I want us to take just a moment to sit back and kind of reframe. This is what I did yesterday.

James: 09:28

Rest is not something we do life once life is under control. If you feel like the only time you can take rest is when your life gets under control. Like me sometimes, once these things settle, then I can take a rest. It's not something we do once life is under control. Rest is how we remember that our life was never into control to begin with.

James: 09:55

I look at my schedule and my life has become more scheduled. I have to put everything in the calendar or I'll miss something. I'll not do something. I'll let someone down that I've made a promise to. So I have to be very careful, which also allows me to be more realistic with my calendar.

James: 10:13

But as I look at it, I also realize that I get calls I didn't expect. Somebody stops by the office. I didn't expect something needs my attention that I didn't realize needed my attention until it did. And so I imagined my life was under control but rest is a way of letting go of the fallacy in my life that I had any control to begin with. And instead taking that moment to know that that's what my body, my mind, my soul needs right now.

James: 10:52

Busyness often tries to save us from feeling our limits. We don't want to be finite. We want to feel that we are infinite, that we have all the energy and all the bandwidth that we need. But rest gently returns us to the truth. I am finite.

James: 11:18

And taking a rest is not a failure in fact, it's a success for me. It's an opportunity to step back and just remind myself what a gift life is. It isn't what we do when we're done being human. It's how we stay human. You know, I look periodically at the model that is sort of set out in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.

James: 11:52

And, you know, we think of that as the creation story. And I don't want to get into a long talk about the relation you know, the creation story, was it really a seven day creation, all those kinds of things. The story itself is not about how long it took. It's about an orderly kind of space and about how at some point in the process, in the story itself, on the seventh day, even the one, the divine one, the one who is behind the entire creation, who set it all in motion and is in every creative act, even that one, took a day of Sabbath, of rest. Now, I have a Sabbath day every week.

James: 12:47

And it's only in the rarest moments in times of human need that I don't use that Sabbath as a day of rest. When someone needs me on that day, I can respond. But it's not just the Sabbath day that I need for rest. Sometimes I need to take it at another time. And perhaps you find yourself to be true.

James: 13:10

What are you afraid? What am I afraid of will happen if I rest? Am I afraid that the world will stop turning? That someone will realize that I don't have the level of imagined competence that I once thought I did, or we imagine we'll disappoint someone. There is a subtle belief in us that somehow the things that are ours to do depend on us, and they do.

James: 13:53

But oftentimes in our busyness, we start to take on things that are not ours to do. Are we afraid that taking a rest will interrupt our myth of being indispensable? It's hard to think of ourselves as other than that. I say over and over again in the podcast that we are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift we already are. And that's absolutely true.

James: 14:27

And we begin to imagine that being infinitely precious means that we are indispensable. No, it means we are a gift. It means we're unique. It means we bring something unique to the table, something precious, something no one else can bring to the table, but not that we're indispensable. And that becomes hard.

James: 14:55

That becomes hard to take. God doesn't need us to exhaust ourselves in order to keep things going. The world is not held together by our over functioning. Rest is an act of trust, not of abandonment. So that's what I thought I would share with you today, bring to you today.

James: 15:25

I want to invite you to rest, but you may look at your schedule and say there is no time to do it. Can you find five minutes? I think rest is something you do when there isn't any time for it, but when you need it. Can you trust enough to take just five minutes to sit down, not to sit down with your phone to go through it or your laptop or your computer to fill with moments of being productive, but can you simply be and know that God loves you just as you are? Because that's absolutely true.

James: 16:14

As you take a breath in those moments, those moments of rest, speak to yourself, I don't have to earn this. I don't have to earn this. I get to have this, this gift of rest. So my friends remember you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you are and you also need rest. So don't let dizziness get in the way of stepping back and of resting when you need it.

James: 16:54

Until the next time I wish you all the best and I wish you some rest. Thanks for joining me today hope you'll share this if it's been helpful to you. Until the next time.