I’m writing this from a sunbed on an island where sun, sea and swimming pools are in fairly generous supply. Which, admittedly, is a slightly ridiculous place to begin a reflection about work, money and whether I have understood rest properly. My wife is nearby. There is food when we want it, somewhere to swim when it gets too hot, and for a couple of days there is very little demanding anything from me. This is our first holiday abroad together, and neither of us have flown for a long time. It has cost us hundreds of pounds, was last minute and, perhaps more significantly, has used a good portion of my first proper pay cheque in around nine months.
When we get home, the roof will still need replacing. There will be shifts to work, money to save, and a house that seems to have a supernatural ability to know the precise moment we have a little financial breathing space before presenting us with something else that needs repairing and squeezing that space right back out again.
But, for now – as my wife keeps reminding me – I am here.
And apparently this is where my brain has decided to start thinking seriously about rest again.
I haven’t written much this summer. In fact, I haven’t written much at all since starting my new job. There have been ideas, notes, half-thoughts, first drafts and things I have wanted to say but never quite found the time – or indeed the energy – to say properly. That, I have come to realise, has bothered me.
Last night, I dreamt about a friend. We met, for some reason, in an airport and had a coffee together. He asked me how the summer had been, and I told him that I hadn’t written as much as I had wanted to. Then he asked me a question.
“What do you need?”
Coaching? Accountability? In the dream, I chose accountability. And then, almost immediately, I found myself qualifying it. I needed time. Because I had so many shifts.
Then I woke up.
Now, I’m not particularly interested in turning every strange, weird and wonderful dream into divine intervention or some sort of spiritual message. Sometimes dreams are just dreams. But I am interested in paying attention, particularly when something touches a nerve that was already there.
And this one did.
Because I still want to write. I still care deeply about A Curious Follower. I still believe in creating spaces where we can slow down, ask questions, notice what is happening underneath the noise and pay attention to the ordinary movement of God in everyday life. But the shape of my everyday life has changed.
And that has started to complicate something I once felt reasonably confident talking about.
Rest.
The rest guy gets a job
There is another layer of irony here. Last year I published an entire book about rest.
The Radical Recall to Rest grew from a conviction that we have become very good at confusing exhaustion with faithfulness, busyness with importance and productivity with worth. I wrote about Sabbath as gift rather than reward, about finding rhythms that allow us to stop and breathe, and about remembering that we are loved before we have achieved anything at all.
I haven’t changed my mind about any of that.
If anything, I think my understanding is going deeper.
For much of the last nine months, A Curious Follower brought in very little money. There were some paid subscribers, some books sold and occasional bits and pieces, all of which I remain genuinely grateful for, but nothing close to a reliable income. And I want to be careful with the language I use here. We were not living in poverty. Our material needs were taken care of. We had a home, food, family, options and access to forms of borrowing if things became really difficult. Those things matter, and pretending otherwise would diminish the very real experience of people for whom those safety nets simply do not exist.
But we had very little financial margin.
And margin, I am discovering, comes in different forms.
I had more control over my time then than I do now, but that did not automatically make life feel spacious. There is a particular pressure that comes when there is enough to keep going but very little room beyond that. Repairs become things to postpone. Unexpected costs feel heavier. The future becomes harder to plan. Eventually, however much you believe in what you are building, the numbers start asking questions too.
Something had to give. So I got a job.
The hope was fairly simple: bring reliable money into our household while continuing to write and grow A Curious Follower alongside it. Work and write. Provide and create. Give A Curious Follower room to continue without expecting it to carry a financial weight it simply could not carry. And in one sense, it has worked. There is more space now.
There is also less.
More financial space. Less time.
The work that helped make this holiday possible is also part of the reason I arrived here needing it. Neither truth cancels the other. And, perhaps that sounds obvious, but I think I had imagined margin as though it were one thing. More free time meant more space. More money meant more space.
It turns out you can gain one kind of breathing room while losing another.
Fish, chips and scraps
A little while ago, I was eating fish and chips. This is not unusual enough to deserve much theological reflection, but stay with me.
Where I come from, you can ask for scraps. I’m aware the name for these changes depending on where you live, so humour me while I explain them without starting a regional conflict.
They are the little pieces of batter (and sometimes fish – if you’re lucky) that are left behind after the fish has been fried. They are scooped up separately and sprinkled over the top of your meal. Some stay crisp. Others gradually soften into the gravy, curry sauce, mushy peas or whatever else you have decided belongs with your chips. They mop things up. They fill little gaps. And, when they are good, they are really good.
But they are scraps. Small things that are usually left behind.
But, that word has stayed with me.
When I wrote The Radical Recall to Rest, I tried hard to make rest accessible. I never wanted to suggest that Sabbath become something that required an expensive retreat, an empty diary or a week away somewhere beautiful. I wrote about five minutes. A cup of tea. A walk. A breath between responsibilities. A moment of prayer in the middle of an ordinary day.
To be clear – I still believe deeply in those moments.
Perhaps more now than when I wrote about them.
There have been shifts where a few quiet minutes have mattered. Journeys home where silence has been enough. Small gaps in otherwise full days where something in me has settled. God has not waited for my diary to become spacious before meeting me.
There is sacredness in the scraps.
But scraps are not the whole meal.
And perhaps that is where my understanding has gone deeper.
There is something beautiful about discovering God in five minutes when five minutes is all you have. But I don’t want to become so good at celebrating those five minutes that I stop asking why five minutes is all somebody ever gets.
Sometimes five minutes is enough for five minutes.
It does not mean five minutes is enough for a life.
Sometimes we need an afternoon. Sometimes we need proper sleep. Sometimes we need someone else to cook dinner. Sometimes we need a day off. Sometimes, when we are able, we need a holiday and the gift of extended space.
And sometimes the barrier is more serious.
Someone may need decent sick pay. More predictable working hours. Enough staff that saying no to one extra shift does not leave everyone else struggling. Affordable childcare. Enough income that losing a few hours of work does not mean losing something essential.
That is different from filling every spare evening with optional commitments and then wondering why there is no room left.
Sometimes we create our own busyness.
Sometimes the lack of space is not something a person has freely chosen at all.
And I think our conversations about rest need enough room to tell the difference.
Who actually gets to choose?
Reading back over some of what I wrote, I have noticed how much of my own language about rest assumes choice.
Protect your time. Set a boundary. Say no. Put the phone away. Make space.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that language. I still need it. There are things in my life I can choose to put down, and there are times when I am responsible for creating my own lack of margin. Some of us really do need permission to stop filling every gap.
But choice is not distributed equally.
You cannot always say no to the shift that pays for something essential. You cannot always move the deadline. You cannot always choose a quieter week because your body needs one. There are people who know perfectly well that they need rest. They do not need another person to persuade them.
The barrier is not willingness.
It is opportunity.
Money. Work. Caring responsibilities. Health. Housing. Circumstances that leave very little room for manoeuvre. So perhaps alongside asking, How can I rest?, I am becoming more interested in another question:
Who gets to rest?
Not who deserves to. I think rest is for everyone.
But who actually has access to it?
And perhaps, slightly more uncomfortably, whose lack of rest helps make my own life easier?
I don’t have neat answers to that. But I think it is worth asking.
Work was never the enemy
I saw something recently suggesting that Christian culture has perhaps become too focused on rest and needs to remember that we are also called to work.
Honestly – it irked me.
Possibly because I have become slightly protective of my unofficial reputation as “the rest guy”. But mostly because I don’t think Scripture asks us to choose between work and rest.
I keep finding myself going back to the beginning of Genesis.
Before we reach the familiar image of God resting, humanity is given something to do. We are invited into the care of creation. To be fruitful. To grow. To take responsibility for what has been entrusted to us.
There is meaningful work before there is exhausting work.
Human beings are not made simply to sit back and watch creation happen. We participate in it. We make things. Grow things. Care for things. Build relationships. Solve problems. Provide. Create.
Then comes rest.
Not because work was a mistake, but because life has rhythm.
Making and enjoying. Giving and receiving. Movement and stopping. The problem comes when that good work becomes distorted – when providing becomes constant pressure, when productivity becomes identity, or when one person’s comfort depends on someone else carrying an unfair burden.
The story of Pharaoh and his bricks feels rather different from the garden.
More bricks. Same time. Keep producing.
And suddenly Sabbath begins to sound less like an argument against work and more like a limit placed around it.
Enough. Stop. People are more than what they produce.
That matters to me because getting a job was not a failure of what I believe about rest. The previous arrangement was not financially sustainable. Wanting A Curious Follower to succeed did not make it capable of paying the bills.
Work has brought good things into our lives.
There is dignity in earning. In turning up. In learning something. In doing a job well and receiving money because you did it. There is relief in seeing a proper pay cheque after months when income has been uncertain.
There is tiredness too.
Both are true.
Perhaps the question was never work or rest. Perhaps it is how we allow both to remain good without asking either to become everything.
A costly and generous pause
Which brings me back to the sunbed.
I don’t want to pretend this holiday is a metaphor for scraps. It isn’t. It has cost real money – money that could absolutely have been spent somewhere else – and it is also a real blessing we have chosen to receive. Our first holiday abroad together, after a long time without one, made possible in part because our financial circumstances have changed.
I am deeply grateful for it.
For a couple of days, someone else has cooked for me.
That sentence feels surprisingly significant after months of thinking about work and rest.
Someone else has cooked. Someone else has cleared the table. Someone else has cleaned the room. There is a pool I haven’t maintained and food I haven’t shopped for. Of course, none of that magically appears. Other people are working while I rest, which itself feels worth noticing.
But for these few days, some of the ordinary weight of life has been lifted.
The roof will still be there when we return.
And perhaps there is always going to be a roof of some kind. Something sensible. Something responsible. Something that could absorb whatever margin has appeared. Wisdom matters. I am not suggesting that every desire becomes holy simply because we call it rest. But if we wait until every responsibility has been funded, every repair completed and every uncertainty removed before receiving anything good, I am not sure the moment ever arrives.
Life remains unfinished.
And sometimes rest means being able to enjoy something good while knowing that unfinished things still exist.
For now, the roof exists. The shifts exist. The questions about A Curious Follower exist. But so does this. My wife beside me. A book. A swimming pool. The sea. Food somebody else has cooked. Space. Not scraps this time. Something fuller.
And perhaps that is why I have started thinking again.
Going deeper, not backwards
I don’t regret The Radical Recall to Rest.
I don’t think I need to correct its central message either.
I still believe rest is gift rather than reward. I still believe our worth is deeper than our output. I still believe small pauses can become sacred spaces in very ordinary lives.
But books are snapshots.
You write from somewhere, and then life keeps happening. Perhaps what I am learning now is simply another layer of something I was already trying to say. Making rest accessible cannot only mean making it small enough to fit whatever space remains.
Sometimes we should also ask why so little space remains.
And if Christians believe rest is good, perhaps our concern cannot stop with our own diaries. Sometimes making space for somebody else might look wonderfully ordinary: cooking the meal, watching the children, taking something off their plate, cancelling a meeting that does not need to happen. Sometimes it might mean asking harder questions about the workplaces, churches and communities we help shape.
Do people genuinely have permission to stop?
Or do we simply tell them they do while creating systems that make stopping almost impossible?
That doesn’t make rest the answer to everything.
Work matters. Responsibility matters. Providing matters. Showing up matters. But perhaps rest is one of the ways we remember that none of those things get to define the whole of a human life.
Returning differently
So this is me writing again.
Not with a grand relaunch, a carefully designed content plan or a promise that there will now be something new in your inbox at exactly the same time every week.
I don’t think my life currently fits that rhythm.
A Curious Follower looks different because my life looks different. My relationship with work has changed. My relationship with money has changed. My relationship with time has changed.
And my understanding of rest is not disappearing.
It is going deeper. There will still be scraps. A quiet drive home. Five minutes before work. A cup of coffee I actually taste. A moment with my wife. A sentence written down before it disappears. A prayer that gets no further than, “Here I am.”
I don’t want to despise those moments because they are small.
There is sacredness in the scraps.
But perhaps the scraps also remind us that human beings need something fuller too. Meaningful work and room to stop. Responsibility and enjoyment. Providing and receiving. The small moments we find wherever we can, and – when it is possible – the wider spaces in which somebody else cooks the dinner and the unfinished things can wait until tomorrow.
So here I am.
Still on the sunbed. My wife nearby. The roof waiting patiently – or perhaps not so patiently – for our return. A few more shifts waiting after that. And somewhere between the dream, the work, the fish and chips and these few days away, I have found myself wanting to write again.
I don’t think the book I wrote about rest was wrong.
I think life is inviting me further into the question.
How do we find sacredness in the scraps? Yes. But also – how do we help create a world where scraps aren’t all people ever receive?
I don’t have the answers. But I have missed asking questions like these.
And perhaps that is enough for a return.
Josh | A Curious Follower
Josh Barker writes at acuriousfollower.com. His book The Radical Recall to Rest is available now.