Your Right To Rest

Preface to the Online Edition

The Wayne E. Oates Institute is delighted to publish the Online Edition of this classic work by Wayne E. Oates as part of the Wayne E. Oates Library Collection.

For the many people who feel exhausted and overworked, this book affirms that all human beings have an inalienable right to rest. Dr. Oates confronts the destructive role of fatigue in spiritual and interpersonal relationships and demonstrates how fatigue cause individuals to experience a personal energy crisis. He reflects on the meaning of living in harmony with the rhytmns of life while also showing the need for sufficient sleep and the value of home as a haven of rest. He concludes with a discussion of what he referes to as the "prayer of rest" and reliance on the resources of God's renewing power.

This book was part of the Potentials: Guide for Productive Living series edited by Wayne E. Oates and published by Westminster Press. This was a series of books that addressed important issues in everyday practical terms and offered concrete suggestions for dealing with them. It was a series designed to reflect the wisdom of the Bible and Christian principles while offering encouragement to rise above personal problems.

The complete text of the original Westminster Press edition of Your Right To Rest, published in 1984, is republished here by the Wayne E. Oates Institute as it originally read. Please note that while the ideas expressed remain relevant to today, the language, particularly with regard to inclusive language, reflects the publishing practices common to the era of its original publication and not the more recent perspective of either Wayne E. Oates or the Oates Institute.

This specific edition has been designed for ease of reading online with the text formatted to a comfortable column width and the web pages containing only a portion of each chapter. Each web page in this edition contains links to the next and previous pages as well as to the book's Table of Contents.

For those interested in printing a copy of the book to paper, we highly recommend the E-book edition. This is published in the Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (pdf), which enables printing a copy of the entire book with indexed pages. The E-book edition is available through email or on CD-ROM. For more information click on the Info/Order button on the left or call 502.459.2370.

Wayne E. Oates Institute
Louisville, Kentucky
August 2003

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