sleep – The4thDave Blog

It’s not an accident that I am following my tribute to coffee with a meditation about sleep. I usually over-indulge on the former when I don’t pursue enough of the latter. But it’s important for my well-being to keep reminding myself that sleep is a gift.

I heard a preacher years ago (I wish I could remember who it was and give him full credit) talk about how sleep is a gift from God to us in order to remind us that we are not God and we don’t have to be awake all the time. Much like Sabbath, sleep is a loving limitation built into the fabric of life, a Fatherly hand on our shoulder when we keep reaching to try to accomplish more and more. Sleep is a reminder that we are but a whirlwind of dust and breath, and each night, we must “die” in order to rise again with the sun. “…He gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2b) Sleep is a gift from a good, good Father.

My kids hate going to bed. They fight and they fuss and they resist it with all their might, but their mother and I insist on bedtime. We love our girls and we know what they need even better than they do themselves. They need rest. We make them lie down and sleep for their own joy.

And yet somehow, their “dada” still insists that he is superhuman, that he is beyond sleep. This was my habit for far too many years: an endless cycle of caffeine and sugar and entertainment and distraction and work and stress and toil and ache and weariness.

These days, I both love and fear sleep, to be honest. I’m so often tired, and sleep can be a friend. But when I do sleep for any length of time, my body reminds me what the years of poor diet and little exercise and inconsistent sleep have sown into my middle-aged bones, and I wake up with a groan in the morning, stiff and stumbling as I frankenstein my way down the hallway. (Yes, yes, that’s not the monster’s name, I know.) The inflammation in my joints is the price paid for so much foolish insistence on stubborn pseudo-immortality.

Will I learn from my mistakes and start taking better care of myself? I’m starting to, slowly, very slowly. (Pray for me in that regard, if you follow Jesus as I do.)

The best part of sleep is knowing that my God “does not slumber or sleep” (Psalm 121:4). I don’t have to worry or fret about the cares of this life. I can put my head on the pillow knowing that my God is there standing watch, and I can rest in His abundant kindness.

In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.
Psalm 4:8

It’s after 1 AM, October 2nd. No, I don’t plan to write all my posts as soon as the clock flips over to the next day. It just so happens I’m up right now, so I’m taking the opportunity.

This last week has been…oof. The earliest I’ve gotten to bed in the last 5 days has been 12:30am–the latest, creeping right up to the witching hour. For some reason, work this week has seemed a bit overwhelming. Part of the reason may well be that my day-shift hours have been a bit broken up with other responsibilities. Working from home brings a host of benefits and privileges, but along with those comes the added responsibilities of changing your new home-based “co-worker’s” diaper or feeding her a bottle when she gets up from her nap. Daily office traumas involve various burns, scraps, and goose-eggs on the noggin. Hugs must be given, bandaids applied. These things take time.

This means that my most productive time-block this week has been after the kids are in bed and the nightly “reset” has been completed (so, roughly 9:30pm until 2am). Of course, this isn’t a long-term solution. The various children have a secret shift schedule somewhere in their collective sisterly consciousness, such that they systematically alternate which one wakes up in the wee small hours of the morning with a dirty bottom or empty stomach or energetic mind. I don’t have the option (or frankly the inclination) to live the “rockstar lifestyle” of the freelancer or night owl who works until not-quite-dawn and then sleeps until not-quite-noon. For some indecipherable reason, my employers insist that I be cognizant when the vast majority of the working world is. Killjoys.

I’m forty, gang. I don’t have the physical wherewithal to stay up all night and still get up with the sun. Your humble correspondent needs a solid seven-plus to feel decent–not even good, just functionally human. This 4-5 hours a night business is a young man’s game. Shoot, it was my game two decades ago, when I would hang out at the local greasy-spoon diner with my theater-major buddies, slurping down sodas and chomping on plate-sized cinnamon buns, staying up until the faintest whisp of dawn cracked the horizon and sleeping for a few hours before rolling out of bed for breakfast and my mid-morning class.

What am I getting at? Who knows. It’s now 1:30am and I’m talking to you lunatics.

Maybe it’s this: For decades, I treated sleep like a necessary evil. I pushed myself to stay up late, running hard on a dirty-fuel combo of caffeine and corn syrup, and all that did was leave me with a severe weight problem and some sort of metabolic disorder that makes me feel like I’m made up of equal parts inflammation and exhaustion.

What I didn’t realize two decades ago, and what I understand now, is that sleep is a gift from God that I shouldn’t have taken for granted. And long weeks of late nights like this one are supposed to be a rare exception for times of crisis, not a habitual pattern.

Get some sleep this weekend, friends. It’s not a punishment. It’s a present you get to give yourself. Do good work, love the people you’ve been given to love, and then rest. Goodnight.

Tag: sleep

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