Introducing… Rest!

We are excited to share our next value we are exploring is…. rest!

Central to Flourish Experiences, we spend seasons exploring values we want to see cultivated in Oklahoma City. In recent months, a good amount of people who were part of Flourish Experiences and our larger network talked about experiencing a lack of rest which became the root cause for many other issues they felt, particularly as many people began going back to work during the pandemic. In these conversations, we continued to come back to rest as a value we wanted to explore. 

In individual and community spaces, we are curious about the idea that, when we are resting, what are the versions of things that help us remember who we are. We are thinking about rest as a practice that helps us remember and re-member, or return to the wholeness, of ourselves. This could be creative practices, physical practices, or mental practices. Many of the world’s systems and structures do work to keep us from rest, dis-member us from ourselves and our communities – we see true rest as space that gives you a chance to deal with and re-member parts of yourself and to your community. We also know that re-membering can be restorative, but rest can also be about grieving, seeing the hard parts of life, and moving to places where we do not have to deny these realities, but hold them in stillness as part of living.

As we transition from Welcome to Rest, we recognize several bridges between these two values. First, we acknowledge, value, and learn from the resettled refugee community in Oklahoma City as our largest demonstrator and teacher of rest. They serve in many ways as mentors to teach us about slower ways of living that invite more rest in and that promote community care in deep and intentional ways that often do not occur in many U.S. communities. In communities where deep grief can be felt in funerals and deep joy can be celebrated at weddings or birthdays, these neighbors continue to model what holding space to re-member can offer to the wholeness of ourselves and our communities. It is space to fully be– a practice also of welcome.

When we imagine Oklahoma City as a city of rest, we know that this means substantial systemic change. We are asking how people who are part of or control systems might choose to value people’s lives rather than value profits; what does it mean to cultivate systems in which people are re-membered rather than dis-membered; what would it look like to adjust expectations to the wholeness of individuals rather than what they offer a bottom line? How do we hold space for everyone to give and to receive? 

Some of the resources helping guide us is Tricia Hersey’s work with The Nap Ministry in which Hersey acknowledges how we have to think about inequity to rest along resources and accessibility. We are also looking to Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance, that argues rest is not a performance, but something deserved, necessary, and a right of being alive.