A Place to Restore your Mental Health

Life and activity can drain our mental health, but there are places to restore. Take notice and soak in them.

There is a place I want to go to. The gardens are beautiful. Full of colour all year round. Fruit trees are full of ripe fruit ready to be eaten.

There are beaches sparkling with shells and sand. Fish swim in the sea and there are waves perfect for surfing. The sunrises and sunsets are magical. Soft tender hues changing every minute.

The food that is provided is tasty, nutritious, and good. Large tables for abundant parties but also little tables for intimate connections.

The beds provided are perfect to sink into and you fall into a deep, secure sleep.

Soft music and perfumes fill the air.

Your favourite people are there too. Friends, family, soulmates, all enjoying the dance.

A place to restore the soul.

I need places, in the here and now, that mimic or point to this heavenly place. This new heaven, this new earth. Revelation 21

A place to restore

I live in a very beautiful country. People come from all over the world to take in the scenery of New Zealand.

I remember taking some overseas friends on a brief trip around my local area and stopping to take in a view.

We had walked up through some bush and now stood on top of a hill. We looked down into a valley of trees and a river flowing into the sea.

What was it about this view?

I had seen it a hundred times, but it always had a kind of therapeutic effect on me, and on anyone else that saw it.

Something in this connection with nature and beauty trickled life into the tired soul.

A provision of something that was beyond one’s self manufacture was meeting a need.

It’s a shift in focus

The focus of life shifts away from all the tired giving out to an openness to receiving.

This is for you.
Take
eat
take
drink
let it nourish deep within.

This is part three of a series called Restoring your soul.

And he withdrew

It wasn’t all giving. It wasn’t all meeting everyone else’s needs.

The life of Jesus, fully human and fully divine, had a perfect balance of giving and receiving. Jesus points us to the need to restore a tired soul.

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. Matthew 14:13

Jesus saw many people. He went up on the mountain and sat down. His followers came to Him. Matthew 5:1

Then there is this beautiful verse about God alluring us into the desert to spend time in restoration.

Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her. Hosea 2:14

To me, there seems like a gentle magnetic pull on myself from God to come away and be restored.

It’s there and every time I see something of beauty, I want to dive right in and soak in it. To be restored by it.

Taking in the good

Places that restore have an invitation to rewire our brains, but we have to be intentional in this.

Rick Hanson says that we have very a slippery brain in the sense of taking in positive experiences.

Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Rick Hanson

We seem to have an innate ability to grab hold of the negative and then let it burrow in and take up residence.

The invite of places that restore is for us to soak the good in.

How to take in the good

Take note of an invitation. Invitations from places to restore are everywhere, but do we take notice? We need to be open to the little whispers that say ‘Come.’
Dive into those experiences for at least for at least ten to thirty seconds. That doesn’t sound long, but go deep. Give yourself to the beauty. Try to let it fill your body and be as intense as possible with it.
Sense that this positive experience is soaking into you. You can smell a rose, but this is more like taking a long perfumed inhalation of its scent. This gift is becoming part of you.
Repeat. Do this often, so much so that it becomes part of your normal everyday life.

A second place to restore

We’ve looked at a place to restore our soul, but what about restoring the place?

Much of our landscape needs restoring. A bringing back to life.

In my local area, there are many areas that need to be replanted with native trees, grasses and other plants. As we do this, then birds, insects, fish begin to re-inhabit these places.

The places we restore become places for others to restore from.

A place to restore is an invitation to restore God’s creation.

Perhaps it’s us being involved in creating a new heaven and a new earth.

Questions?
Comments?
Email me 🙂📨
barry@turningthepage.co.nz

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Quotes to consider

Creation is not a concept; it is a work of art—like a fragrant and tasty stew, a roiling and radiant van Gogh, or a soft and tender touch of a mother—and it can’t be known without sensual wonder. Dan B. Allender
God’s triune being ‘is radiant, and what it radiates is joy. It attracts and therefore it conquers. It is, therefore, beautiful.’ In other words, the triunity of God, its difference in unity, its relationality and harmony, its being and economy, its loving interweaving of persons (perichoresis) as if in a cosmic dance, radiate beauty. Karl Barth
Beauty is not under our control and mastery—we cannot easily define it and own it. But when we encounter it, we are its servant. Dan B. Allender
God intends the beauty in nature to arouse us and to capture our hearts to desire him. This requires opening our senses to beauty. Dan B. Allender
The holy comes in a moment when we are captured by beauty, and a dance of delight swirls us beyond the moment to taste the expanse of eternity in, around, and before us. Dan B. Allender
Wholeness can never be experienced unless we find our place within the larger wholes within which we exist. David Benner