Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast

Guest (Female): I firmly believe that God gives us the responsibility to train our children in his ways, and that's a huge responsibility. What Focus on the Family did was give us the resources to do it.

Jim Daly: I'm Jim Daly. When we work together, we can transform our nation one family at a time. Make a monthly pledge today at focusonthefamily.com/families.

John Fuller: We're all busy and your tank is running on empty. So how do you find time to refill the tank? How do you find time to breathe, to rest, to relax? Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller along with Dr. Danny Huerta, who heads our parenting team.

We're going to hear now from a conversation that Focus on the Family president Jim Daly had on his show with Aaron Lynam. She's a Colorado native, and she and her husband Grayson have four kids. I love how she talks about finding rest even in a busy schedule on a consistent basis.

Jim Daly: Aaron, welcome back to Focus on the Family. This is quite a trend now. I know several friends of mine who are embracing the Sabbath, kind of reorienting themselves and their families around the Sabbath. Generally, is there a movement within the Christian community to reawaken to God's Sabbath day and what it means?

Aaron Lynam: I believe there is, and I believe it goes much further than just the Christian realm because we're also seeing it in the secular realm. One thing I've been blown away by as I've dived into Sabbath with my family and in my work is I'm now having opportunities to go speak to corporate and business groups about Sabbath. Because they see the power of rest to really unlock their potential as leaders that we really know is just by God's design.

Jim Daly: When you look at that, the pace at which we're doing things, the load, think of laundry. I mean, the way they did it 100 years ago. That took you probably eight hours right there. One day a week, you'd have to do the laundry.

So things have had innovation where we can throw it in a machine and we just have to move it, pull it out, hang it, fold it, whatever. But there are 1,400 things that we've been able to fill that space with now. So that pace that we're going at, how do we get a hold of it, do an inventory, and say, "Okay, how do I spend my time?"

Aaron Lynam: That's a really good point about innovation. We have all these technologies and things that we can do now that can help save time, but that can also be a bad thing. Because it means that when you think about when we harnessed electricity, we really changed our ideas around time. We can work at any hour.

So when you think about God engineered into us a circadian rhythm, that natural wake, sleep, rest, work cycle. When we harnessed time, we kind of did away with that. Circadian means around a day. We kind of ballooned that to around what can "around a day" mean? How can we pack it full?

I think the first thing is just not packing our schedules so full that they're like a game of Tetris. We've whittled down time. When you look at the biblical times and they viewed time in these big chunks, we've whittled that down to a 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, nanosecond. Down to the smallest measurement of time, it's called a zeptosecond.

Jim Daly: A zeptosecond? I've never heard of that.

John Fuller: I haven't either.

Aaron Lynam: I think only scientists use it to measure the speed of light.

John Fuller: I like it though.

Danny Huerta: Sounds fun.

Aaron Lynam: But to that point, we have so whittled time down to be like, "How can we pack every moment?" But what if we were to carve out some more margin and actually leave time for rest in our lives?

Jim Daly: What keeps us from that? It sounds so right, but why do we not do it?

Aaron Lynam: A lot of hustle and hurry boils down to the fear of missing out. We have every opportunity in this society to pursue so many different ventures and build so much, and God put that into us. Work came before the curse, before the fall. God designed us with this purposeful desire to create and to build and to progress.

But we really let that get out of hand and we start pursuing it for our own means. It's really another way of worshipping creation rather than the creator, only we're worshipping ourselves as the creator. So we're trying to pack everything full and we say, "Oh, if there's five minutes there, I have to fill it if I'm going to get ahead, if I'm going to get that opportunity." Or if I don't know what to fill it with, I'm going to pick up my phone and look busy because we're so uncomfortable with leaving time empty.

Jim Daly: I think some of this too is rooted in how we have devalued rest, that it's anti-Western culture, that if you rest, you're sinning. I knew a pastor, H.B. London, who worked here at Focus. He was older at this point, still working, but probably 70, but he still wanted to work.

He ended up with pneumonia and was in the hospital. I remember going to see him out in California and he said, "Jim, I just prayed to the Lord and said, 'Lord, if you get me out of this and heal me, I will work harder for you.'" I was like, "H, I don't think that's the equation the Lord wants from you right now."

Have you thought about, "If you heal me from this, I'll take more time to take care of your temple and take care of your body," meaning his body? But speak to that thing that we buy that there's so much time a day and we got to get so much done. Even in a secular context, a sales guy, I've got to work 12 hours a day to outdo the competition or 14 hours a day. Meanwhile, his marriage, his family's crumbling. How do you assess this in a healthier way?

Aaron Lynam: It really goes back to changing our mindset and seeing this as God's design for our thriving. This is actually a gift from God. When you look back at creation, God gave us this beautiful pattern because God created for six days and then he rested. Not because he needed to, Isaiah tells us God does not grow tired or weary, but I believe it was for two reasons.

The first was to stop and delight. The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew Shabbat, which can mean to stop or to delight. So God just simply wanted to take in everything that he had just made and then to give us a pattern because while God does not need to rest, we do.

We see that God created and then rested, but Adam was created on the sixth day. So Adam's first full day was a day dedicated to rest. We were always meant to start from rest, and from there that rest truly fuels every endeavor. What my family saw when we began resting just over three years ago, it felt like such a risk. I had major doubts. How are we going to get everything done in just six days?

We became more productive, more effective, more creative. I'll give you a case study with my husband. He runs a contracting company and before we began resting, he was exhausted. He was a one-man show, we were hardly paying the bills, he had been at this for six years at the time.

Then we take this big risk on rest. Three years later, he's grown to a team of 10. He's an incredible leader. He has built all these strategies and systems and grown his revenue by 500 percent. All while taking a day of rest every single week with his family. And it's not a prosperity gospel. It's not "do this and God will do this," but it shows God's plan. His design for rest is not lazy, it is not idle. It's fruitful.

John Fuller: Danny, as long as I've known you, which is 15 years, you're always doing stuff. You're really a busy guy. And yet you incorporated rhythms, especially when the kids were in the home, that kind of anchored you there and also recharged you. What were some of those things that you did?

Danny Huerta: I pictured a pause button, John. Just pressing pause and going, "Okay, I need to pause this, put it to the side," and I needed to put incremental commitments to certain things, especially when I was doing the PhD program. It had to just be, "Here's a time I'm going to spend on that," and then I've got to shift over.

We had family celebration every week. So we found an evening where it was just family celebration and we figured out our schedules and then taking walks, playing basketball, playing some type of something in the house. Sometimes we would do Nerf gun wars and the kids were participating in coming up with what are some ideas that we could pursue to rest and to have fun. We didn't do it perfectly. We worked a lot in our house.

John Fuller: You individually, I remember there was a season where you kept bees. Was that a recharge kind of thing?

Danny Huerta: It was. My son now, he loves to hold bees in his hand and he says someday he's going to be a beekeeper. You know what's funny is we did gardening. That was something we did as a family often. My son is married and they have a duplex and in this home, they don't have a yard but he's got plants all over inside his house.

It's been fun to see him get into this as a married man, but it was something we did as a family often. I noticed when I took time to rest well, when I did it well, I was more patient. I was more attentive to what the kids were talking about. I was more attuned to them emotionally. Like I was present with them emotionally and feeling that sympathetic, but I was more playful, John.

We lose that quickly. Under stress, we lose our playfulness. How fun is it to be in our home? It's an important question for us to ask. Not that it always has to be fun, but it needs to be enjoyable.

John Fuller: Is the best you showing up? That's how I think of it. Am I showing up well? Why not? I'm exhausted. So find that thing which fills you as a parent and then let that spill over into the rest of the family. I love the examples you've given.

Danny Huerta: One of the things that's important here, I think this is key because I see it often in my counseling practice. Kids know when you're not paying attention, when you're just pretending to pay attention. Then they don't feel known by you and they're going to be less likely to come to you in the future to talk to you about things because they think you're too busy and they don't want to bug them.

The more attentive you are, the more likely they're going to come and say, "Hey, can we talk for a little bit?" There were moments where I wasn't fully attentive and I know my kids felt that because they cut it short, they would go do something else.

When I was fully in there with them, you could see they wanted to linger in that moment. So pay attention to that. Refill so you can be fully attentive and if you can't be in that moment, say, "Hey, let me put a timer on. Right now I'm working through some things and I'd love to come back and be fully present." Kids will respect that and will be thankful for it.

John Fuller: I just want to say personally, there were moments when I wasn't very good. I wasn't showing up well. I wasn't present, I wasn't fun. I was just there. It's never too late to work on the relationship. We're fortunate we have ongoing relationships with all of our adult kids. I don't see them as much as I would like to, but they are independent, they've got their own thing going. I just count it a joy when I can spend time with them.

That's what you're really aiming for because the season with kids in the home is pretty short compared to the season when they're adults and you can relate to them. So don't ever think it's too late. If you have kids in the home, grab onto the concepts that Aaron has been sharing, that Danny's been illuminating. Grab onto moments of rest so you can show up better.

Get a copy of Aaron's book, which we have available for a donation of any amount. That'll be such a great deep dive on this content. If you're like me, you're going to need to read this kind of a book over time and really start to incorporate incrementally all the ideas so that you get to a better place.

The book is called *The Nature of Rest*. Click the link in the show notes, make a donation, we'll send the book to you. Then we have a link to the entire conversation that Jim Daly had with Aaron in the show notes about creating margin and about implementing some of these ideas that you've heard today.

Next time, Pastor Ted Cunningham talks about the importance of mealtime with your family and how you can make that meaningful. I'm John Fuller, and on behalf of Danny and the entire team, thanks for joining us for this episode of the Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast.

Guest (Female): Davonna grew up in a dysfunctional family filled with abuse, but we gave her hope. I support Focus on the Family because I hope others will be impacted and grow in Christ just as I have. That they will see healing in their past and what they can do for their future.

Jim Daly: I'm Jim Daly. Let's transform our nation one family at a time with your monthly pledge at focusonthefamily.com/families.