At the end of a long day, many of us know the routine. We finish what has to be done, change into comfortable clothes, find a chair or the corner of a couch, and finally stop moving. Then the phone comes out. We answer a few messages, check the news, watch a video that leads to another video. Maybe we put on a show we have been saving. There is nothing especially wrong with any of this. We are no longer working. No one is asking much from us. This is the part of the day we call rest.

An hour later, the body may tell a different story. The neck is stiff. The eyes are tired. Maybe the jaw is still tight. We have been sitting for a long time, but something in us has not settled. Our minds have traveled through news, photographs, arguments, other people’s lives, unfinished work, and tomorrow’s worries. The body has been on the couch the whole time.

The problem may not be only that we rest too little. Maybe we have also learned to rest without really coming back to our bodies.

The Body We Manage

We pay a remarkable amount of attention to our bodies. We count steps, measure sleep, track heart rates, record workouts, and monitor blood pressure. A smartphone can tell us whether we slept well before we have even decided how we feel about the night. Much of this is useful. Some of it can save lives.

And yet we can know more and more about our bodies while feeling less at home in them.

The body can easily become another project. We improve it, measure it, discipline it, repair it. When it works well, we hardly think about it. When it slows us down, frustration comes quickly. Hunger interrupts the schedule. Fatigue comes at the wrong time. Pain refuses to stay in the small place we would like to give it.

Listen to the way we talk. My knee is giving me trouble. My back is acting up. My body will not cooperate. I cannot get my sleep under control. Behind this language is often an assumption: the real “me” is somewhere inside trying to get things done, while the body is supposed to follow orders.

Hillary McBride has written about this kind of estrangement. [1] She asks us to take seriously the difference between looking at the body from the outside and actually living from within it. The body is not just something we assess from a distance. We feel fear, safety, grief, pleasure, shame, connection, and loneliness in and through our bodies. We do not first live our lives somewhere else and then bring the effects back to the body. Our bodies are involved from the beginning.

We notice this more when the body changes.

Think of someone sitting on the edge of a bed after hip replacement surgery, trying to put on a sock. A movement that once took two seconds now requires thought. He pulls one leg closer, pauses, reaches down, and cannot quite get there. He tries again. His foot is right in front of him, but it feels strangely far away. Frustration comes quickly: Why won’t my body do what I tell it?

The question makes sense. But another question follows: Why have we come to expect the body to obey us so completely?

The Body Is Not Something We Carry

Rowan Williams pushes against the idea that a human being is basically an independent mind that happens to occupy a body.[2] We live bodily. We live in time. We depend on other people long before we can do anything for them in return. We receive language, food, care, touch, and even much of our sense of who we are from outside ourselves.

That may sound philosophical, but everyday life makes the point quite well. A staircase looks different to an injured knee. A crowded room feels different when hearing is difficult. Four hours of sleep can change the patience we bring to a conversation. Fear may tighten the chest before we have found words for what is wrong. Grief can make an ordinary room feel unfamiliar.

Sue Campbell and her colleagues make a similar point.[3] Our capacity to act is not simply the work of a strong mind making decisions while the body follows along. What we can do is shaped by our bodies, histories, habits, relationships, and surroundings.

Most of us already know this without reading philosophy. A parent awake with a crying infant at three in the morning does not meet the next day in the same way as someone who slept eight hours. A person waiting for a medical diagnosis hears an ordinary phone call differently. Pain changes attention. Fatigue changes patience. The body is not standing outside our lives waiting for instructions.

The body is part of how we meet the world. That may help explain why some kinds of rest leave us strangely tired. We stopped working, but we never stopped bracing. We sat down, but our attention kept running. The schedule was empty, but the body was still carrying something.

Sometimes We Need to Get Away

But not every escape is a problem.

A caregiver who has spent twelve hours attending to someone else may not need another lesson in awareness. A person living with chronic pain may be grateful for a movie that pushes the pain toward the edge of consciousness for an hour. Someone in grief may need an evening when nothing deep is asked of them. Sometimes a silly television show is exactly what the evening needs.

Any idea of rest that makes tired people feel guilty soon becomes one more thing they have to carry.

Yet not every way of getting away leaves us in the same place afterward. Some forms of distraction simply help us get through the evening. Others seem to give us a little more room inside our own lives.

We have found ourselves asking a different question about rest. Afterward, are we a little more available to the life in front of us? Can we notice that we are hungry before hunger becomes irritation? Can we hear the tiredness in our own voices? Can we sit with another person without immediately looking for somewhere else to place our attention?

We do not know any device that can measure that.

A Faith That Keeps Returning to Flesh

Christians should not be surprised that the body matters this much. The biblical story keeps returning to physical life, even when we sometimes prefer a more spiritual version of Christianity.

Genesis does not picture a human being as a soul dropped into temporary housing. God forms the human from the dust of the ground, breathes life into him, and the human becomes a living being (Genesis 2:7). Dust and breath belong to the same story.

Then John gives us one of the most surprising sentences in Scripture: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). Flesh is a difficult word to get around if we want spiritual life to mean leaving the body behind.

Jesus is born. He becomes hungry and eats with people. He walks long roads, touches and is touched. He gets tired enough to sleep in a boat during a storm. He weeps. His body can be wounded.

Sam Allberry reminds Christians how much of the gospel concerns our physical selves.[4] The body is not packaging around the part God really cares about. The Christian story concerns embodied people, including people whose bodies are weak, sick, disabled, aging, or dependent on the care of others.

The Heidelberg Catechism puts a similar idea into words many in the Reformed tradition have heard for years. Its first answer says that I am “not my own, but belong—body and soul” to Jesus Christ.[5] The line is so familiar that it is easy to pass quickly over those two words: body and soul. The body, too, belongs within that promise. That should at least make us hesitate before treating it simply as equipment, even our own equipment.

Christian talk about the body can become surprisingly narrow. We often talk about fitness, health, discipline, appearance, or sexual morality. Those things matter. But they do not tell us what to say about the body that can no longer run, or the body that has slowed with age, or the body waiting for test results, or the body that needs another person’s arm to cross a room.

Those bodies are not less human.

Christian hope does not answer bodily weakness and death by getting rid of the body. Paul’s long argument in 1 Corinthians 15 moves toward resurrection. There is much about resurrection we do not understand, but it is hard to read that chapter and conclude that God’s final answer to embodied life is escape from the body. Christian hope points instead toward resurrection and transformation.

So the body we return to matters. It is not necessarily the body we had at twenty-five. It is not some imagined body that is strong, lean, pain-free, rested, and independent. It is the body that woke up this morning. It may carry an old injury. It may need more sleep than we wish it did. It may move more slowly than it once did. It may frighten us because something has begun to change.

Still, this is the body through which today will be lived.

The Limits We Keep Trying to Outrun

Rest brings us close to our limits, and most of us have mixed feelings about that.

We can work late, but not forever. We can miss sleep, but eventually the body has something to say about it. We can push grief aside for a while, but sometimes it returns in the shoulders, the stomach, or the breath. The body has a stubborn way of reminding us that we are not limitless.

We do not always welcome that reminder. Most of the time, we would rather our bodies simply keep up.

Christian faith does not ask us to call pain good. Nor does it ask us to refuse medicine, therapy, or technology. A hearing aid can open a room that had become closed. A wheelchair can enlarge someone’s ability to participate in life. A video call can bring a distant child close to a homebound parent. Technology can sometimes help people live more fully in their bodies.

But food, sleep, help, and care are not defects in human design. We have always needed them. There has never been a truly independent human being.

Rest makes this harder to ignore. We stop while the work is unfinished. Emails still arrive. Someone else makes a decision without us. We go to sleep, and for several hours we know almost nothing about what is happening in the world.

For people who have learned to measure their worth by usefulness, that can be uncomfortable. Rest can expose a belief we do not always know we carry: that we must keep moving in order to matter.

A Small Return

McBride brings these questions back to ordinary life.[6] Living more fully in the body does not require a dramatic spiritual experience. Often it begins with noticing something small.

The cup is still warm in the hand. My shoulders have been raised for twenty minutes. I am halfway through a meal and cannot remember tasting the first few bites. Someone I love is speaking, and I notice that part of me is already preparing to leave the conversation.

Nothing dramatic is happening. That is probably why these things are so easy to miss.

Digital life can make what is far away feel very close. A message from another state, a crisis on another continent, an opinion from someone we have never met can arrive in the hand with the force of something happening in the room. At the same time, the body is telling us quieter things: the chair underneath us, the shallow breath, the person at the table, the fact that we are tired.

We do not want to turn this into another program for self-improvement. We can become preoccupied with the body just as easily as we can ignore it. Nor do we imagine that people before smartphones were wonderfully embodied and present. Human beings have always found ways to avoid themselves.

Christian worship has never been disembodied. We kneel. We stand. We sing with breath. We eat bread and drink from a cup. Water touches us in baptism. Other voices surround us in worship. Even when our minds wander, worship still gathers us bodily.

Jesus’ invitation to weary people is about more than physical rest: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Still, it is worth noticing who gives the invitation. He calls people toward himself. And the one calling them is not an idea. He has a body.

What Rest May Tell Us

One problem with the way many of us rest is that we take the habits of work with us.

Did it work? Did I sleep enough? Am I recovered? Am I ready for Monday?

Those are reasonable questions. We ask them too. But if those are the only questions, rest begins to look like maintenance and the body like equipment we are preparing to use again.

Sometimes good rest tells us something less convenient. We discover how tired we really are. We notice that a relationship has become thin. We realize that we have spent the entire week with our teeth clenched. The pace we have been calling normal may no longer look normal once we finally stop moving.

The body is often where that truth first appears.

To rest also requires trust. We stop while things remain undone. We sleep with problems still unsolved. The world goes on without our supervision. That can be humbling. It can also be a relief.

Christians should know something about receiving a life we did not create. We receive breath, food, sleep, and care from other people. We receive a world that was here before us and will still be here after us. And grace, too, is received rather than achieved.

Our bodies have been reminding us of this all along. Every night our eyes eventually close. Every meal reminds us that we cannot sustain ourselves from within. Every embrace requires somebody else to be there.

Maybe rest is one place where we stop trying so hard to get beyond our limits and our need for others.

The Body Is Still Here

Evening comes again. There is unfinished work. The phone is nearby. We are tired.

Tonight rest may mean leaving the phone in another room for a little while. It may mean going to bed before the list is finished. For someone else, it may mean taking medication, asking for help, or letting another person carry something that cannot be carried alone.

There is no perfect way to do this, and I am not sure we need one.

The day has already been lived in the body. We sat through the meeting. Our shoulders tightened when the conversation became difficult. We ate lunch while our attention was somewhere else. We made it home.

Now we are tired. Maybe that is worth listening to before asking one more thing of ourselves.

The work will still be there in the morning.

Notes

[1] Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021).

[2] Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).

[3] Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin, eds., Embodiment and Agency (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

[4] Sam Allberry, What God Has to Say About Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021).

[5] The Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 1.

[6] Hillary L. McBride, Practices for Embodied Living: Experiencing the Wisdom of Your Body (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2024).