Small, Sacred Spaces of Rest

In April of 2019, my husband returned home from a four-month deployment to the Middle East. While he was there, he worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. While he was there, he didn’t have a single day off. He knew this ahead of time, and I suggested to him that we go on a vacation when he got back, somewhere restful. He said no, he would just take a week off at home when he returned. I was skeptical. Then, a couple of weeks into the assignment, as we were video chatting one afternoon (well, afternoon to me–it was around two a.m. for him, and he’d just wrapped up his workday), he said, “Sooo–about that vacation . . . ”

We spent a week in the Smoky Mountains, in a rented log cabin on a steep mountainside. We toured the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, played mini golf, wandered around a stunning aquarium. We slept in, grilled out, took a nap every day. By then, after four months of solo parenting, I needed it almost as much as he did. We came home rested, ready to return to normal life.

Less than a month later, I already felt like I needed another vacation.

Granted, it had been an unusually busy month. For one thing, I had to spend a week playing “catch-up” at work after my vacation (Have you ever heard someone say they’d rather not take a vacation because catching up afterward, at work and at home, undermines the effect?). A deluge of responsibilities hit all at once, at home and at work, not all of which I expected. I struggled to catch up on projects that had been pushed out of the way by other, more urgent, urgent projects, but which still had deadlines attached and therefore had to be finished. I missed out on more than one beautiful weekend because I was stuck in front of my computer keyboard. As I settled into bed at the end of that weekend, I realized I was telling myself, “Just a few more days. Just a few more days of this crazy pace, and then you can rest.”

Not long after that, I was at a homeschool event at a church. It was loud and chaotic–tons of kids and adults, lots of noise. I wandered into a bathroom to use the facilities. As the door closed behind me, suddenly the noise and chaos disappeared. I looked around. There was a large vase of silk hydrangeas on the countertop next to the sinks. There was a wooden bench graced with an embroidered throw pillow that reminded, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.” There was a filmy white-on-white embroidered curtain at the window, and the light coming through it was soft, filtered by the floaty fabric.

I texted a small group of mom friends and said, “Know where I am? A bathroom. Know why? It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. I could literally take a nap in here. There’s even a bench to sit on and a floaty curtain at the window. I came in here to pee, but now I’m having trouble leaving.” I snapped a photo to show them I wasn’t imagining the ambiance, and then we all had a good chuckle. I felt a strange relief at having identified exactly how palpable my need for rest had become. Finding rest in a church bathroom sounds funny, I know, but my soul was refreshed for a minute in that quiet space with its softly filtered light.

The truth is, we need regular rest. Daily rest. Spiritual rest as well as physical rest. And when life gets too crowded and hectic for even little pockets of true rest, we need to reassess our priorities.

We talk a lot about rest at my contributor blog, The Glorious Table, and I believe this is a clear indicator of the deep-felt need for rest that we, as busy modern women, carry with us. In fact, if you search the site for “rest,” you’ll get scads of results. We’ve been writing about the need for rest since we sat down at the table, a place we want to be but which is also an extra labor of love for each of us.

I have a name for the daily rest practices I try to implement: Small, Sacred Spaces. And when I get to this place of “I-just-had-a-vacation-but-I-already-need-another-one, I know I’ve been neglecting my Small, Sacred Spaces–that I need to turn back to them, and quickly, before I find myself crying in a bathroom. My Small, Sacred Spaces keep me from losing sight of God, of the beauty with which I’m surrounded. They help me stay in touch with my soul. Most of them are simple. Some of them may sound silly. All of them are intentional and life-giving. All of them allow me to take a deep breath. That church bathroom, silly as it sounds, counted as a Small, Sacred Space for those few minutes–they were a respite from the chaos.

Your Small, Sacred Spaces will undoubtedly look different, but here are some of mine:

• Stepping out onto the front porch at dawn, breathing in the early morning air for a few minutes, cup of coffee in hand
• Getting up at before everyone else in the house is awake to sit in silence and then read something that nourishes my spirit
• Pausing between tasks during the day to read a poem
• Knitting a few rows of something while waiting during my daughter’s dance class
• Dancing in the kitchen with my daughters
• Putting down my phone and picking up a book instead
• Writing a page in a journal or scribbling a few words of a poem in a notebook
• Getting up from my desk to do a few stretches after a time of focused concentration
• Listening to an audiobook while folding laundry
• Brewing a pot of tea in the afternoon
• Listening to music–classical, movie soundtracks, medieval, Gregorian chant–while doing the dishes
• Lighting a candle
• Coffee or dinner with a like-minded girlfriend
• Voxing a friend or group of friends for encouragement or to let off steam
• Going to the bookstore alone for an hour
• Taking a walk around the block

Prayer, of course, is a Small, Sacred Space–perhaps the most important one of all.

My favorite Small, Sacred Space, prior to the pandemic, happened once a month, when I attended a half-day retreat for women at a local retreat center. We showed up at 8:30 a.m.; they fed us breakfast; there was a short, meaningful service with Communion; we spent the next two hours in silence; they feed us lunch; we go home. During the time of silence, people read, prayed, wrote, colored, knit, napped, pondered, sat on a screened-in porch (there are several) and listened to the birds, walked the many trails on the grounds–whatever their spirits needed. These hours away always left me feeling re-centered, reconnected to myself and to God, refreshed for the next phase of work and life. How did I find such a thing? The answer is almost too trite to bear: Google.

What are your Small, Sacred Spaces? Are you intentional about them? How can you build more of them into your day?

A version of this post was originally published at The Glorious Table.