We give up control when we sleep; so who is running things?
If you were to ask my wife what my superpower is, she’d probably say it’s my ability to go to sleep.
It’s true, I guess. When I lie down and close my eyes, I am usually asleep in just a few minutes. In fact, I don’t like to watch TV while lying down – I have a hard time staying awake. But even if I’m not in a prone position, if I close my eyes for a few minutes, I can drift off.
My wife is envious. She has always hard a hard time sleeping, sometimes only a few hours a night. She would usually go to bed before me – I tend to write late at night – but when I went to bed, she was usually awake. Despite her best efforts at going to sleep, I’d always go to sleep before she did. Usually I’d wake up before her – she would eventually fall asleep for a few hours – and sometimes I’d go downstairs and see the living room furniture had all been rearranged. She’d do that in the middle of the night, because she couldn’t sleep and she’d think of a new look and, since she was awake … well, no time like the present, I guess.
There have been times in my life when I had trouble sleeping. Usually it was due to worry, or stress, or whatever you want to call it. Those are miserable times.
In the Book of Job, (7:4) it says, “When I lie down, I think ‘How long before I get up?’ The night drags on, and I toss til dawn.” My guess is most of us have experienced that, to some degree or another.
It’s hard, not being able to sleep. It’s hard enough to face life when you’re well-rested. But when you’re suffering from lack of sleep, problems tend to become all-consuming. We can blow them all out of proportion, thinking of all the things that can go wrong. One sleepless night is tough; two or three in a row and even the smartest, most resilient people you know can start to come apart.
Sleep deprivation is widely recognized as a form of torture. We know that during the course of a regular day, our cognitive abilities can start to slow down over time. The longer we go without sleep, the more it affects more than just our thinking. I read that after 24 hours without sleep, cognitive impairment is comparable to a blood alcohol level of .10 percent, beyond the legal limit for driving. Our comprehension abilities, our reaction time, our awareness of what’s around us is affected. We can even start to see things that aren’t there.
I know from friends who have chronic sleep issues that pain, combined with sleepless nights, can take over the way you think. Pain becomes the loudest voice in your head, that can drown out rational thought, make you doubt things you know to be true. Sleep deprivation only makes it worse.
Psalms 127:2 says “God grants sleep to those He loves.” King David, for all his many, mostly self-inflicted, troubles, wrote a good bit about sleep. In Psalm 3:5 he said, “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.” And in Psalms 4 he says, “I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.”
I’m sure people who suffer through sleepless nights can read those verses and question whether God loves them. Why would there be this promise, and then give good people who suffer through no fault of their own so many sleepless nights?
But then there is the Apostle Paul, who writes about sleepless nights in 2 Corinthians 6, including lack of sleep in his list of hardships he endured. He later, in chapter 11, says, “I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep … face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.”
And then I think of Jesus, the night before he would be betrayed by one of his closest followers. He didn’t sleep. His disciples did. He even chides them for not being able to stay awake with Him. But then, they didn’t know what was coming and Jesus did. We talk a lot about all that Jesus endured on that last day; in Catholic theology it’s referred to as the “passion of the Christ” (from the Latin pati, which simply means “to endure” or “to suffer.”). Rarely have I heard anyone focus on “lack of sleep” as part of that suffering.
Again, Job says, “When I think my bed will comfort me and my couch will ease my complaint, even then you frighten me with dreams and terrify me with visions.” (7:13-14)
I know people who could say – and do say – exactly what Job is saying.
Why do we sleep? I mean, I know it’s because bodies need time to rest and rejuvenate, even heal. But God could have made us so that we didn’t need sleep. Think about it; if you sleep eight hours a night, that’s one-third of your day. That means if you have a normal sleep pattern, you spend one-third of your entire life sleeping.
What happens when we sleep? Besides our bodies resting and all that. The world goes on without us. When we sleep, we surrender control. We check out for eight hours (more or less). We basically lose consciousness, at least as it relates to the things actually happening around us. All those things we think can’t happen without us – they’re still there in the morning.
And it’s not like other people are awake taking care of our lives while we sleep. For the most part, the people around us who live in the same time zones are sleeping when we sleep. And yet the whole world continues, as if it hardly realizes we’re not participating.
Whether we realize it or not, sleep is basically trusting God to keep everything running, under control, to make sure that – most of the time, anyway – we don’t wake up to a disaster that could have been avoided if only we’d been awake.
Once a day, God has us check out. We like to think we’re in control, but for those eight hours or so that we’re asleep, we’re not. It’s like every day, God sends us a message to remind us that we’re not Him, that he has – as the old song goes – ‘‘the whole world in His hands.’’
Psalms 121 says God “who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord watches over you— the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”
In other words, it’s God telling us to rest easy. This remains His world. He is in control.
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