Episode 11: Curtis “CZ” Zackery: Discovering Soul Rest
Transcript
Patsy: Hi, I’m Patsy Clairmont, and I’m a Boomer.
Andrew: I’m Andrew Greer, and I’m a Millennial
Patsy: And you are listening to Bridges.
Andrew: Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations.
Patsy: Our guest today is Curtis Zackery, but I know him as CZ. He is kind of a name that crosses our lips often in my home because my whole family is a fan of his. He’s a great guy with a gift for bringing forth the Word of God in a way that it can be assimilated.
He wants to give you permission to rest. Can you believe that? The name of his book is Soul Rest, and he invites us all to breathe a little deeper and to live a lot calmer. And getting permission is important, isn’t it, Andrew?
Andrew: It sure is. Even CZ’s demeanor, his presence, gives the permission. He is such a comfortable fella, and I love being in his company.
You first invited me to one of his Bible studies here in Franklin, Tennessee, at the church on the staff where he serves so faithfully and generously. But this conversation really is another example, another sample, of his comforting presence, and one of my favorite things that he says is rest is not laziness.
So be ready to sit back, give yourself permission to rest and recline into this conversation with Curtis Zackery.
Patsy: Today’s bridge is one over troubled water. Don’t we all wish we had a bridge over troubled water? And guess what — we do. We may never have thought of that song in exactly that way, but you will before this is over.
One of my favorite people is about to make a trek with us over a bridge of understanding, and his name is CZ, otherwise known as…
Andrew: Curtis Zackery. But whatever you would like to place in the…
Patsy: CZ zone?
Andrew: That’s exactly right. I do want to just set the record straight that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is not about the Lord, in case someone…
Patsy: Not the song itself.
Andrew: But it is one of my favorites. You know, my brother was a hippie at heart. In the early 90s, he was taking me to elementary school — he was in high school — and in an old ’66 restored Volkswagen Beetle that he had restored, playing Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan and of course Simon & Garfunkel. So that’s where I first heard “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and fell in love with it, folk music and all that.
That doesn’t really have a lot to do with Curtis Zackery, but we are so glad you are here today, CZ.
CZ: It’s incredible to be here. I love following where you’re going, so it’s all good.
Patsy: Let me just say this about CZ. I attended one of his classes, and actually, it was a series of classes and it was line upon line and truth upon truth, here a little and there a little, until I left so full and overflowing of understanding of who God is in rest.
Andrew: Yeah, and you have a book. Your platform — if you want to call it that — elements of your teaching and of your speaking and of how you’re connecting with so many people now, is around the subject of rest.
CZ: Yeah, indeed.
Andrew: How did you come into that to begin with, because that’s not exactly the easiest concept to really wrap our heads around or our schedules around or our hearts around in this era of our society.
CZ: Yeah. I think it really is ultimately the resolution being what Ms. Patsy already said, that it is indeed this bridge over troubled water.
I think suffering and loss are the greatest teachers that we have in our humanity. It’s something that every single person experiences in both cases. The situations and the manifestations of that vary, but I think it informs who we are and what that looks like for our lives moving forward. And I think the source of understanding where and how we find our way in the midst of suffering is really the anchor for the soul that it talks about in Hebrews 6. I think God intends for us to know and understand His intention for us from the very beginning. It’s found and is brought and made clear I think in seasons of suffering.
For me, that really was the pathway toward rest being the resolution that I feel is the culmination of this picture of the gospel for humanity. It’s for me this convergence of everything that I’ve studied and sought to know and understand about the way of Jesus. I feel like the word “rest” summarizes that for me, and so it is definitely a story that has been filled with some grief, some pain, a lot of hurt, but I’ve resolved that rest is the way forward.
“Suffering and loss are the greatest teachers that we have in our humanity.”
Patsy: You and your wife, Monique, have known loss and heartache. Can you talk about that at all?
CZ: Absolutely. I think one of the things we’ve discovered over our journey together as a married couple and then also just connective to this idea of rest is, as painful as it is, it’s important for us to open the pathway of communication, especially around the area of miscarriage, and that’s what we’ve experienced a couple of times.
It’s something that I’ve come to realize is a commonality. So many people share that experience, and so there’s a temptation I think for people to minimize that part of your journey, simply because of its commonality. But the thing that we realized is that loss is loss, and loss requires grieving and mourning. Part of our journey was trying to give ourselves the permission to acknowledge the pain of the loss and understand how it informs our lives.
We were hopeful to start a family, and we quickly realized after the first pregnancy that we had lost the pregnancy, and it was something that really just rattled us. We didn’t expect anything like that. I think so many people on their terms think that they are the ones that are in control of when and how you become pregnant or start a family, and I think there’s an element of when we can engage in that process but ultimately God is the one who is in control of the when, the where, the how, and the if. I think we became very aware of that.
The second time we experienced loss was a number of months later, and we carried further into the pregnancy. This time it was definitely a more arduous process, both physically and emotionally. I think through experiencing that loss it helped us to ask the proper questions, both of ourselves and also of God.
Those are areas that I think many of us as human beings are not very excited about delving into. Introspection is not something that’s always a pretty endeavor, and then I think also to present the living God with questions that you have about His ways and His purposes feels very fearful for me. I think that that kind of got us to a place where we realized we needed to have that conversation.
Andrew: We speak about His ways being higher than ours, and yet in the middle of grief, it feels so much lower than ours.
I want to go back to you talking about loss being… You said, “Loss is loss,” even though it is often unseen. Of course, in a case of miscarriage, that can often be an unseen loss. There are so many losses and griefs that people are experiencing, that we are experiencing, on a day-to-day basis that are indeed unseen.
Where do you find that it is important to begin to kind of exercise those griefs and speak about them, and then what is meant for us maybe just to weigh out before God and to do that within our “prayer closet.” Does that make sense?
CZ: Yeah, that’s an incredible question. I think it’s an important idea really. It’s shown to us in Scripture, and it’s almost a blip along the reading if we’re not careful. There’s a verse that’s very popular and commonly shared I believe to be many times not in its original intention or context, but in James chapter 1, verse 2, it says that we need to count it all joy when facing trials of many kinds.
I think a lot of times what happens is we are sharing that with the hope and intention to be an encouragement, and what we’re really saying by saying that is we think you need to be happy while you’re hurting. And that’s not the intention that James is trying to put forward. He says that you need to count it all joy when facing trials of many kinds. He doesn’t say you need to be happy, but there’s this joy which comes from the fruit of the Spirit of God.
It’s this transcendent idea that is not circumstantial. And what e’s talking about when he says that you need to be joyful is not you need to be smiling your way through pain, but your joy is actually connected to what it says in verse 4, that our suffering makes us complete, lacking nothing.
So our joyfulness is rooted not in my temporary circumstance. It’s that even though I’m in pain right now and acknowledging that pain, my joy is God is doing something in a way that I can’t even see right now, and my joy is set in the God of the universe who is sovereign and over everything. I don’t understand it and I don’t even need to understand it, but what I know and have my anchor in is that God is working.
So that’s just kind of the general premise, but to answer your question specifically, I feel like what we miss as the blip is when we read that verse — count it all joy when facing trials of many kinds, or various kinds — I feel like various kinds is a really important sentiment because it’s easy for us to look at someone else’s suffering and relate our suffering to theirs and minimize then our suffering because it’s not what they’re suffering. For example, I have friends who are walking through cancer right now and their prognosis is not looking very awesome, and so therefore, anything that I am wrestling through, it feels so irrelevant. But yet it is my suffering.
And so yes, I can properly assess that where they are is relative to mine a deeper and more serious place, but I do need to acknowledge that the suffering that I’m actually experiencing does matter for my life. So if you’re walking through having just recently been laid off of your job and you know that you’re going to be for a short amount of time without work, but then you look at someone who has just had their house burn down and they have lost everything, it’s easy to go, Well, my suffering is nothing. No, it’s not nothing. There are trials of various kinds.
I think where we can really do well is giving ourselves permission to acknowledge that our suffering is indeed suffering because if it’s gonna get to verse 4, where our suffering makes us complete, lacking nothing, for us to not acknowledge our suffering is to miss the chance for God to shape and form who we are as a result of our suffering, which comes in various ways.
So I think that there are times where we do process that internally and we allow for what we’re experiencing to be something that we can consider in our closets or prayer time, but I think it also is important to find venues of conversation to express, This is where I am, this is what I’m feeling and hurting in, and I want you to enter into that with me. Pray with me. Let me just dialog about it so I can bring it before God so that He can do His work.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: “Where would I be if I did not believe I would experience the Lord’s favor in the land of the living? Rely on the Lord! Be strong and confident! Rely on the Lord!” Those are the last two verses of Psalm 27 from the Abide Bible. It is a new Bible that has been in my home now for several months, so I’ve had time to work with it and it to work inside of me. It offers beautiful, old art that is associated with verses, so it helps it to become a bigger picture in our mind and our retention is improved. It has places for us to journal on the side as we read. It also has instructions on how to pray this Scripture, how to meditate on it, how to contemplate it so we can sit and soak in God’s Word and allow it to dwell richly within us.
Andrew: What I love about the Abide Bible is that it’s invitational, not just informational. It’s inviting us not to just exercise the Word of God in our head but to really invite it to dwell in our hearts, which to me reminds me of John 15:4: “Abide in me and I in you.” So you can order your copy of the Abide Bible today at bridgesshow.com/abide.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: I’m excited about Food for the Hungry because they know how to get to the need of people. If you meet their needs, then their heart is open to anything else you say, so they’re feeding the children not only to nurture them and prepare them for real life but to hear about Jesus. And one of the ways that they’re able to help these families and it be sustainable is by chickens, Andrew.
Andrew: That’s right. It’s incredible. For just $14, you can provide a family with a chicken, and if you want to multiply that blessing, you can provide them with two chickens for just $28. And we know that chickens multiply, so that’s more eggs for the children to have the protein that they need, for them to sell the extras at market, and those chickens last eight to 10 years. It’s a huge blessing. All you have to do is go to fh.org/bridges.
Patsy: I feel like that a lot of times we try to dodge the business of grief, the hard work of grief, because it feels severe. When in truth, it is a gentle teacher of humility and sensitivity. Have you found that to be accurate?
“[Grief] is a gentle teacher of humility and sensitivity.”
CZ: I think what you just said summarizes one of the most important ideas, especially of people of the way of Jesus, because we can fall into this false sense of belief that we should not experience suffering as a result of our connection to Christ. But like you just said, suffering can be the greatest teacher that we would ever experience on earth.
I think C.S. Lewis talks about how it’s like a megaphone that rouses deaf ears. Even Charles Dickens talked about how suffering was his greatest teacher, and he’s been bent and broken but hopefully into a better shape. Like suffering, over and over again, has been remarked by so many people as the thing when you’re able to look back at it as this formative place of instruction and building up. When you’re in the midst of it, it is not unreasonable to think, I hate this. I don’t want this. This is terrible.
So it’s not that we revel in the midst of our suffering, thinking it’s awesome while it’s happening, but we trust that suffering truly is a teacher. So yes, I think suffering, though we often want to rush through it, needs to be appreciated for what it is because I think there is a possibility for us to waste our suffering.
You mentioned I wrote this book, and one of the hardest sentences I wrote in the whole book, the one hardest sentence I can remember writing, was, “Suffering is a gift.” To even say it out loud right now feels so offensive to people who are walking through suffering, but what I know to be true factually in my life is on the other side of suffering, when not wasting that suffering, it has shaped and informed me truly into a better shape.
Andrew: You say it can sound offensive to say that, but is it not one of the more generous statements to… The most generous place that I’ve discovered in my relationships with others, in my connections with others, is through the pathway of grief. And that is a pathway, that is a journey, hopefully out of this grief and probably into another one. But also with our Christ connection, is that not our greatest connection to Christ since His grief and sorrow was so paramount to His identification with us?
“Is [grief] not our greatest connection to Christ since His grief and sorrow was so paramount to His identification with us?”
CZ: Well, I think the reason I would even remark that it comes across or even feels offensive is because our sensibilities are not ones, even in our contemporary understanding of following Jesus, that are given over to suffering as the greatest identification with Christ. We don’t approach our worship in that way. We don’t approach our gatherings in churches that way.
One of the most seldom practiced but important ideas that we have available to us as Christian people is lament. Lament is a gift from God. The Bible has a book of the Bible, Lamentations, lament. The book of Psalms is filled with laments. And lament is important because it allows us to bring our full self before God without resolve. It allows us to present our questions, our pain, our anger, even our shaking of a fist toward God. And we do this knowing that I am presenting to you the reality of my situation, knowing that I cannot fix this myself, and unless you show up to do it, God, because you know what it means to suffer, then I have no hope. I don’t know how it will happen.
There are so many pictures of lament in the Bible where they’re saying, “I don’t even know if I believe that you can do it right now. I’m just being honest with you, God. But if you are the God that I hope you are, you will hear that, see that, and enter into it.”
So to your point, yes, I think it is the greatest way of identification of followers of Jesus with the work of Jesus.
Andrew: And it comes back to that maturation process you’re talking about from a spiritual perspective because if we are actually saying and exercising our doubt to God, Hey, are you going to do this?, with the hope that He will, is that not a part of our spiritual maturation, too, to have that element of — I don’t know if it’s testing — but to really ask of God, Who are you? Show me who you are. Reveal who you are. Or don’t. One or the other, you know.
Patsy: And there certainly is, as Scripture said, a fellowship in suffering. You are so grateful when someone comes to you who’s walked where you’ve been and comes with a full heart of being able to extend themselves in ways that are not offensive and that are supportive.
Now, Curtis, you speak in your book about many levels of rest. One of the things that I think really hits our society today is our busyness. What do you have to say about that? C-Z us.
CZ: You know, I think one of the things that is unavoidable in our culture is the reality that busyness plagues humanity, even amongst groups of people who aren’t filled with resources. We just have this tendency to just make ourselves busy with work, and we do so so often to shield ourselves from the reality of what we actually feel inside. And that’s something that feels like an overstatement, but when we really get down to it, so many agents of numbing and medication are practiced in our busyness.
There’s a man that I held as a mentor from afar for a long time named Eugene Peterson, and he talked about how busyness is equated with laziness. And his idea was that busyness is really rooted in our inability to understand what we should truly value and to prioritize those valuations in our lives. So he talked about it primarily when he was speaking directly to people who are in ministry or working and serving in ministry, how it’s celebrated when busyness is expressed.
You see someone at a coffee shop, and they say, “How are you doing?” And you say, “Oh man, just running around, doing a lot of stuff.” And we celebrate that because we go, Oh okay, you’re not inactive. And I think one of the greatest travesties is that we equate rest with laziness. We think if you rest, you are lazy. They are not synonymous, but we’ve made them synonymous in our culture. And so for us to express that I’m in a restful posture, we’re afraid that that’s gonna communicate that I’m inactive, I’m absolutely not doing anything. Therefore, I’m lazy. Therefore, I’m not worthy of whatever position or calling or responsibility.
And I think it’s so sad that we need to almost manufacture sources of doing just for the sake of appeasing other people’s perceptions. It’s not even so much that we feel like we need to do them.
Andrew: Okay, I’ve got several questions on that because I can definitely be a victim of busyness, but opportunity. So I want to take this to opportunity. It is so hard for me to… I am such an opportunist, and so then that produces busyness because of my inability to say no to certain opportunities, believing they will not come back at another time or that if I do not seize it in that moment. So how does that work out in all this that you’re laying out? What do we do with opportunist?
And there’s so much opportunity, especially in creative fields and our lines of work but I believe now more than ever in everyone’s line of work. There’s ability to be varied and play in all different kinds of sandboxes. So there’s a good aspect to that, right? But how do we truly set up boundaries, and boundaries sounds so constraining, right, but how do we free ourself up within opportunity.
CZ: The first thing I would say to even your remark about boundaries: There’s freedom in boundaries. And we tell that to little kids or we tell that to ourselves about how we lead our little kids, but for some reason, we think that that doesn’t apply any longer once you get beyond needing to be raised by parents. It’s something that we now want to break through those boundaries in order to think that real, true freedom. But there’s freedom in structure.
I mean, why do we have budgets? We have budgets because budgets allow us the freedom to spend within the reality of knowing what we have. And one of the things that you remarked about, it’s funny — you’re asking me a question, but I feel like you said some really important things as you were kind of setting up the premise.
One is the evaluation of your time. I always encourage people that I walk with in this type of thinking and conversation to do a time budget, to assess where you’re spending your time. What does it actually look like? Because in theory, I can say, “I don’t have a lot of time,” but when I see whether or not I have a lot of time, it’s completely different.
For example, if I say, “Hey, we need to watch our spending at home. I need to just kind of make sure I don’t spend discretionary income frivolously, and so I just need to be mindful of that.” And my wife and I agree, and then we kind of think about it and whatever. It may or may not affect the way that I spend money on a day-to-day basis. It’s a whole other thing if I print out my last three bank statements and I circle every single time I spent money on X. Now, I add up that number, I write that number on a piece of paper, and I put it on a sticky note right by my door before I walk out and go, Remember that.
That will bring calibration because, in theory, I’m going, Hey, you need to watch how you’re spending your money. In actuality, I go, No, I need to because this is how I’m spending my money.
So where I would springboard from that into kind of the resolution-based thinking, I think the evaluation begins to show us what we give our life to. We give our life to what we value. That is a non-negotiable. That is true about every human being. We can say whatever we would like with our words, but our lives represent the ideas that we value.
For example, if I say I want to workout, you can say, “Well, I don’t have time to workout,” but for some reason, you’re able to make time for other things that you say you don’t have time to allot to working out. It’s not a judgement of what’s right or wrong. That’s not me assessing your motivation. What I’m saying is you give your life to what you value. Our problem is we’re not honest with ourselves about that. We need to be honest with ourselves about what we value.
So if I say, “Hey, I want to study the Bible more. I want to read Scripture. I want to pray more. But I just don’t really have the time. I don’t have the margin,” I’m not disputing that that’s true. It’s not for me to say whether that’s right or wrong. The only response I would have is in your time budget, where do you put your time. That will show you what you value. You then need to decide do you value something else more than what you have chosen to value in the past. Now I think we can assess our true intuition and motivation.
So even back to your premise, I think understanding these different sandboxes to play in and all those things, really it’s not even that you’re wrong to be opportunistic. None of those things that you are going toward are inherently bad things. But the thing that I would ask is less about which of these is important and more about what do you truly value.
If you value rest, then there will be a no to something for the yes of that something else. And that’s not to say that this is bad or this is good. I just think ultimately rest is something that we truly all, No. 1, are made to experience, and that’s really kind of the whole contention of the book. But then, No. 2, I think we long for rest, and every time you hear the word rest, there’s almost this oasis in the desert where we’re longing to try to find that. But our problem is what we’ve established as our values and what we give our life to have become these barriers to intimacy with rest.
“We give our life to what we value.”
Andrew: Patsy, I hear that you have a book club.
Patsy: I do. Books are what God used to help heal me, so it delights me to offer that service to others, that they could sign up, anybody. All y’alls, come on in. We want you to join in the book club, and we will read ourselves silly and sane. We’ll have different selections, one every month with a bonus. You can check it out: patsyclairmont.com. And also on that page, you’ll see that I do cheerleading for people. I coach them in helping them stir up their creativity to tell their story. But here’s what I know: You’re into a different kind of storytelling, and you’ve been set up to win awards for what you’ve done.
Andrew: I love music, and I have a new record out called Tune My Heart, and it includes some of my really close friends, some of your friends, like Sandra McCracken and Cindy Morgan and Buddy Greene. And you can find that record anywhere you stream or download, or at andrew-greer.com. You know what else, Patsy?
Patsy: What?
Andrew: I’ve got another podcast. It’s not my favorite podcast, but if you like listening to Bridges, then you might like listening to and viewing Dinner Conversations with our pal Mark Lowry and myself. You can find it on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Prime, or simply go to dinner-conversations.com.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: Andrew, I’m so excited that one of our sponsors is Food for the Hungry because I like people who are feeding people. I say let’s get to the basic need that a person has, and let’s build up from there. And when you feed a child, you feed their brain, you feed their disposition, you feed their ability to have strength to do the hard work that oftentimes is involved, even if it’s just their studies. If the synapses aren’t snapping, it’s gonna really be tough, so Food for the Hungry’s got the right idea, and they’re talking chickens.
Andrew: That’s right, Patsy. Bawk-bawk-bawk. You can give a family a chicken or a pair of chickens to help them find the nutrition they need on a daily basis, as well as these chickens are producing eggs all the time. We know that, right? We have friends and neighbors who have chickens now here in the States, and they provide those eggs, which then can be sold at market. So a chicken is this warehouse of opportunity for a family. Now, get this: You can provide one chicken for a family in need for $14. That’s it. That’s the chicken. That chicken lives for eight to 10 years and provides those daily eggs. It’s incredible. You can provide a pair of chickens, because we know chickens multiply fast, to help that family on an even deeper level for $28.
Patsy: Yes. I love the idea you can double the blessing for just $28, and this goes to countries like Bolivia, Peru, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the Dominican Republic. So it’s a wide reach, and it’s something that God spoke to us about and that is giving to the poor and offering something that will help their life. Let’s feed the hungry.
Andrew: Go to fh.org/bridges to provide some chickens for families in need today.
Patsy: And every chicken you purchase for our friends across the world, it becomes an entry into our first ever Bridges giveaway.
Andrew: That’s right. One winner and a guest will receive roundtrip airfare, one night’s lodging, and ground transportation for a getaway in our hometown, Patsy, of Franklin, Tennessee. Plus, we’ll take you to dinner and interview you on a special episode of Bridges.
Patsy: The winner will be drawn on March 31, 2021, so get your chicken before then.
Patsy: I want to back us up just a moment to something you said because we do talk about bridges and bridging the generational gap. You talked about memorization, and I just want to say you need to find time to do that now because later…
Andrew: You’re telling CZ to find time?
Patsy: No, no. I’m telling the listening audience.
Andrew: I was like, You get him, Ms. Patsy.
Patsy: I am saying that when you get to be as seasoned in years as I am, you no longer can memorize. Do it while your brain cells are on speaking terms with each other, while you still have the retention of youth. Get the Word written down deeply within you. So that’s just a gift I’m giving as you go over your troubled waters on a bridge that gives you a future and a hope.
Andrew: Well, and with that intergenerational kind of speech, have you found… I wasn’t saying you were making a speech. I just meant like the, you know…
CZ: That language.
Andrew: Language — thank you, CZ, yes.
CZ: I’m here to bail you out.
Andrew: I know. I’m gonna have to start calling her Ms. Patsy. Anyway.
So how have you seen that play out, because you have been involved in a multi-generational audience, not only with your church but out and about. I feel like you have a very old soul. You have kind of this timeless aspect to you, which I think probably allows you to relate to people in a lot of different places of life. How have you seen rest as either a challenge or an opportunity across generations? Is it the same for everybody, what we’re talking about here, or does it play out differently?
CZ: Yeah, so I’ll start out by saying that the essence is exactly the same. The title of the book is Soul Rest, and I think that that’s the thing that we all truly long for and need. It’s not just a temporal or a surface-level rest. It’s the satisfaction of the longings that we were built to have by God for himself.
Ecclesiastes 3 talks about how He set eternity in the hearts of humankind. Like every single person has been trying for as long as they’ve been alive to satisfy an eternal longing with things that are not eternal. So the rest that we all crave, which is universal, is 100 percent I believe that rest. That’s the kernel that produces everything else.
Andrew: That soul rest.
CZ: That soul rest.
Andrew: Or your book. That’s what we crave.
CZ: Well, yeah. You said that. I didn’t say that.
But what’s interesting is I think, as it pertains to generations, there really is a nuanced conversation. For example, I have many friends who are Boomers, and Boomers are rooted in an understanding that unless you work, you do not eat, and what work looks like is not one that is optional in its manifestation or conditional upon your passions. It’s just you work because you have to work, and if you have a job that’s hard, well, you have a job that’s hard and you do it for 30 years.
I have learned so much from that approach. I think it’s so important to gain value and appreciation for that way of thinking because when we lean into knowing that there are simply things that you need to do, then you appreciate the value of work and putting your hand to things and the return that comes from that.
But what I’ve found from my friends in that community is because of that dogged adherence to the idea of work, work, work, work, work, the idea of rest is almost this kind of belief that it’s at the sacrifice of your family or at the sacrifice of your work ethic. Like you have to give up something in order to rest because unless I work, my value, my identity, my purpose is shifting. It’s not solid. But when I’m working, I know that I have a contribution.
The false belief in that is that our identity, worth, and value are in the things that we do. It’s not that. It’s whose we are. It’s what He has done in and through and for us. And so the rest that is beautiful for a Boomer is to be able to, apart from the work that they do at their hand, find rest in the work that could only be done by the hand of God.
Now you start to move through the generations and the manifestation of that is a little bit different. I’m kind of right on the line of like a Generation X, Millennial. I’m like right there, like right on the cusp. And so someone like me is coming out of the season where I see my forerunners, those who went right before me who have given their life to this work, and they’re saying now in this later season of their life, “I wish I would’ve given more time to my kids. I love hanging out with my grandkids, but now I look at my son and daughter and I think, Man, I gave so much time to work.”
So then my generation looks at that and goes, Okay, well, we’re gonna put more time into our family, so now even the idea of parenting has shifted where for a Boomer, you were just a parent. Well now, moving into my generation, parenting has become a thing. It’s like there’s ways and options on how that looks where it’s like who’s doing what, all that. So that then affects now a new understanding of where you find rest because in my generation, moving even into Millennial generation, it’s almost like, Well, yeah, I have this work thing that I need to do, but for the sake of my family, I can’t rest. It’s not up to me to be able to tap out. We’ve got to parent our kids. And again, we believe this false sense of identity connective to even our identity as parents, our identity in what we hold or manage.
But again, I think the similar idea is not what we put our hand to but whose we are and where we find our source of rest. And then as you go further, Millennial, whatever, it’s always heartbreaking when we make these sweeping generalizations of any of the areas of life, and it really breaks my heart because I feel like Millennials receive the brunt of most of that from every direction. It’s kind of like from up and from down, they receive the brunt of that.
And I think one of the things that I’ve appreciated so much about Millennial culture is that the Millennial generation desires more than any other generation to live with a purpose that sustains beyond their own lives. And that sounds like it’s antithetical to the way that we perceive Millennials because we’ll say, “Oh, well, they’re all about themselves. It’s all about their own platform, their own identity.” Well, no. When you really get down to the heart of a Millennial, they want to give their work, their time, their energy to something that matters and that is sustainably important.
Now the hopefulness would be that that would be for God, but I see that across the board, whether you follow Jesus or not, that the Millennial generation wants to live with purpose. And so I see that the inability to rest even inside of that generation can be something that is really kind of rooted and centered in, I just got to keep going. I’ve got to keep doing.
Andrew: Right, right. Kind of the world hinges on it.
CZ: Yeah, it’s up to me to be… And you carry this anxiety, stress that is connective to your eternal implications of life, but you’re carrying that alone and it’s not based upon the One who’s truly meant to carry it for us.
I could talk about that stuff all day, but just to kind of give you a little bit of a picture, I do think that there’s a nuanced conversation, while at the same time, the kernel, it’s all the same.
Patsy: I feel like a bobblehead when you’re talking. My head just keeps going up and down. I thought, They could put me on the dashboard while you’re talking.
CZ: If I had a Patsy bobblehead… If you’re out there listening and you have the ability to pull this off…
Andrew: Target
CZ: Please, anyone, send me one.
Andrew: We just found out how to keep this podcast going — Patsy bobbleheads.
Okay, we could talk forever. I do have one more question because this keeps coming to my mind, so maybe it’s coming to a listener’s mind. We’re talking about rest and the art of it and what is soul rest, but I keep coming back to can you actually capture for me what are we talking about? What is rest?
CZ: Yeah. Like I said, I think it’s dual-planed in its manifestation. The first one is, of course, what does it look like for us in our daily rhythms to find margin, to find places, where we introduce the opportunity for the restoration and the nourishment that we need in order to put our hand to the work that we desire to do. So in a very practical, tangible way, I think rest is important to do and pull off the things that we hope to do with our lives.
I think that the deeper plane really comes down to Matthew 11, verse 28 through 30. Jesus is standing in front of a group of people who on one side have been setting the rules and laws for all the people to become righteous people before God. On the other side, you have all these people who are subject to these rules and laws, and they are doing everything they can in their own energy to fulfill these ideas that have been imposed upon these people beyond the things that God himself had said. So now these religious people are going, “If you really want to be righteous, you’ve got to do these extra things.”
And this is exhausting, and it’s exhausting for both groups of people. You’ve got the ones who are managing this, saying you’re in, you’re out, you can do it, you can’t do it, you’ve got to keep it up. Then these people that are trying to fulfill this, they’re just absolutely wiped out, terribly tired. And Jesus has the audacity to stand in front of both of these groups of people and say, “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke, or take my teaching, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart.” And then He tells us the thing that we’ve been talking about, that you will find rest for your soul.
So if Jesus is putting forward the idea of finding rest, what kind of rest does He think is most important? Well, He tells us right there, The rest that I will give you is a rest for your soul. And then He goes on to say, “My yoke is easy. My burden is light.”
So the rest is really both our intention as human beings to stop so that God can show us the work that He can only do by His hand in tangible and practical ways, but more importantly, our souls need to stop and realize that we will never satisfy, we will always be at unrest in our souls, until we experience the rest that only comes from His finished work on the cross.
Patsy: This is CZ, Curtis Zackery, and he has been sharing with us on soul rest, and who does not need that? And our world is in such crisis that we can see troubled waters everywhere we look. We so need the bridges that are offered to us through the truths in scripture and the one true bridge, which is Christ himself.
CZ, I’ve loved having you as a guest. I always enjoy your company, and I have benefited deeply from your teaching, so thank you again today for being a voice that matters, that gives us direction.
CZ: That means more than you know.
Patsy: You’ve been listening to Bridges. I’m Patsy Clairmont, and my cohort…
Andrew: Andrew Greer. Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations. We’ll catch you next time.
Patsy: Bridges is co-produced by Andrew Greer and myself, Patsy Clairmont.
Andrew: And our podcast is recorded and mixed by Jesse Phillips at the Arcade in Franklin, Tennessee.
Patsy: Remember, don’t forget to leave us a rating, a review, or a comment. It all helps our little show get going.
Andrew: To find out more about my co-host Patsy Clairmont or myself, Andrew Greer, or to read transcripts of our show, simply go to bridgesshow.com.