I had planned to write this post earlier this week not knowing that last night would be a fitful night of sleep. I had coffee too late in the day and was kept up by a big meeting this morning. Not to mention, work tensions and relationship dynamics haunted me past midnight resulting in even less sleep. I wish I could say these experiences are rare but they are not. Sleeping well has been something I crave and also find fleeting. However, I think there is more to sleep than meets the eye.
Sleep is a design feature that God established. How crazy is it that we lie unconscious for hours? We lie vulnerable and unaware of our surroundings, unable to protect and provide for ourselves. Sleep isn’t some problem with humans, like a software bug that needs to be fixed with an update. It’s part of the design. Our bodies do so much while we sleep. If we avoid sleep, we could eventually die! God designed us to sleep. It’s like he’s trying to tell us that we can’t be on all the time. What would it look like to embrace sleep as a feature instead of a bug? To embrace your limitation. We would have to embrace the reality that we are limited created beings.
God often calls us to prioritize rest. In Christian terms we talk about the word Sabbath. Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). It was made to be a blessing to us because we need to rest. We should think about Sabbath rest and we should think about sleep. Think about it this way. A major pre-allotted time in your life is sleep. God has designed you to sleep 7-8 hours of every day. So that means 1/3 of your life is already accounted for, a built in limitation on what you’re able to achieve. You have already lost a third of your ability to be productive because you are designed to rest. If God just designed us to produce, then he would not have built in the feature of sleep.
I want to be someone who honors God with their sleep. It is entirely possible and necessary to glorify God and enjoy him by sleeping. God doesn’t invite us to a life of busy-ness. He invites to a purposeful life, lived in light of His sovereignty in which we rest well and work hard. Honoring God by sleeping can look like praying before bed and even praying throughout the day so that anxiety doesn’t keep me up at night. It can look like changing my caffeine consumption habits. It can also look like knowing that even if I don’t sleep well, God doesn’t love me less.