Dear friend,
I want to say something to you this Sunday that the world will never say to you.
Slow down.
Not because you are doing too much. Not because rest is good for your health or your productivity or your mental wellbeing. For a reason older and deeper than any of those things.
Because God is not in a hurry. And you were made in His image. And somewhere along the way the world convinced you that urgency was a virtue and stillness was a waste and that the person who is always moving is the person who is always winning.
That is not what Scripture says. And tonight I want to tell you what Scripture actually says. Because I believe it is one of the most countercultural and most needed things you will read this week.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
You know this. You have known it since you were a child. But I want you to sit with something specific inside that story that most people rush past because they are in a hurry.
Genesis chapter 2 verse 2.
By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing. So on the seventh day He rested from all His work.
God rested.
Not because He was tired. The God who spoke the universe into existence does not get tired. Not because He ran out of things to do. The God who sustains every living thing at every moment does not run out of things to do.
He rested because rest is not the absence of work. Rest is the completion of work. It is the moment when you stop and look at what has been done and say it is good. It is the deliberate, chosen, unhurried acknowledgment that the work has meaning and the worker has worth beyond what the work produces.
God built that into the architecture of creation before anything else. Before sin entered. Before the fall. Before any of the things that make rest feel like a luxury rather than a birthright.
Rest was not an afterthought. It was the design.
I want to show you something else about God's timeline that I find remarkable.
Abraham waited twenty five years for the son God had promised him.
Twenty five years.
He was seventy five when God made the promise. He was one hundred when Isaac was born. In between those two moments there were years of silence and years of doubt and years of his wife laughing at the very idea that the promise could still be coming.
And God was not late. Genesis chapter 21 verse 2 says simply — Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age at the very time God had promised him.
At the very time God had promised.
Not early. Not late. At the very time.
God's timeline is not our timeline. What looks like delay from where we are standing is not delay from where He is standing. He is not watching the clock the way we watch the clock. He is not anxious about what has not happened yet. He is moving toward His purposes at exactly the pace He decided before the foundations of the world were laid.
And the people who understood that — who could look at twenty five years of waiting and say He is not late, He is simply not early yet — were the ones who did not lose hope when the waiting stretched longer than they expected.
In Second Peter chapter 3 verse 8 Peter wrote something I have returned to more times than I can count.
With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.
A day is like a thousand years.
I want you to sit with what that means for the things you have been anxious about this week. The things that feel urgent. The things that feel like they need to be resolved now or the window will close and the opportunity will be gone.
God is looking at those things from a vantage point where a thousand years is like a day. Where what feels like an emergency to you is something He has already seen resolved and redeemed and used for purposes you cannot yet imagine from where you are standing.
That is not an excuse for passivity. It is an invitation to trust. The difference between those two things is everything.
I want to tell you what I have learned about hurry across fifty years with the Church.
Hurry is almost never from God.
I am not saying God never asks us to move quickly. He does. There are moments of urgency in Scripture — Moses at the Red Sea, Esther before the king, the disciples sent out two by two with instructions to shake the dust from their feet and keep moving.
But the chronic, low level, background hum of urgency that most of us carry around every day — the feeling that we are always behind, always late, always one step short of where we should be — that is not from God. That is from a world that has decided that your worth is measured by your output and that stillness is something you earn rather than something you were made for.
God does not speak into that hum. He speaks into the stillness that the hum is designed to prevent.
In First Kings chapter 19 He was not in the wind. He was not in the earthquake. He was not in the fire.
He was in the still small voice.
The still small voice is not audible over the hum. It never has been. The hum has to stop first.
I want to ask you to do something today that the world will tell you is wasteful.
Nothing.
Not productive nothing. Not restful nothing that is really just a different kind of doing. Actually nothing. For a few minutes today I want you to stop. Put down whatever you are carrying. Close whatever you have open. Let the hum get quiet.
And then just stay in the quiet for a little while.
Not because you will necessarily hear anything. Not because God will speak to you in an audible voice or send you a sign or resolve the things you have been anxious about. But because the practice of stopping — the deliberate, chosen, countercultural act of being still — is itself an act of faith. It is the body's way of saying I trust that the world will continue to exist without my management of it for the next ten minutes.
Most of us have not done that in a very long time.
Today is a good day to start.
Before I close I want to leave something with you that connects what I have been saying to what I believe is happening in the world right now.
The urgency you feel about this country — about what is happening politically and spiritually and culturally — is real. The things you are watching are real. The stakes are real. I am not asking you to pretend otherwise.
But I have spent months now writing to you about the pattern I see in Scripture underneath what is happening. The chosen man. The opposition from every direction. The survival that cannot be explained. The timeline that is moving toward something even when it looks like it is moving away from everything.
And the thing about that pattern is this.
It has never once moved on our timeline. Not with Joseph. Not with Moses. Not with David. Not with Paul. It has always moved on God's timeline. Slowly from our perspective. At the very time from His.
The man at the centre of this moment is not finished. The story is not finished. And the God who waited twenty five years to give Abraham his son is not wringing His hands about what has not happened yet.
He is moving. At the very time He decided before the foundations of the world were laid.
I wrote about that pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. If you have been feeling the urgency of this moment and struggling to hold onto peace in the middle of it — that guide will help. Not by telling you not to care. By showing you the full picture of what God appears to be doing and why His timeline, though slower than ours, has never once been wrong. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Rest today, friend.
Not because nothing matters. Because everything that matters is in the hands of a God who is not in a hurry. And you were made in His image. And you were made for rest as much as you were made for work.
The week will begin tomorrow. Let today be today.
God bless you. I am glad you are here.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
Today I want you to do one thing.
Find ten minutes of actual stillness today. Not productive rest. Not restful activity. Stillness. No phone. No television. No noise. Just you and the quiet and the God who speaks in the still small voice.
That is all. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.