Sleep. Have you ever thought about the act of sleeping? If you were God, sleep seems like a strange thing to design into your creation. Just think of it, while you’re sleeping anyone or anything could take advantage of you.
What on earth is sleep for?
Of course we know we all get tired and need rest, but why design this feature (or flaw) in the first place. Let’s agree, God clearly could have made us not requiring sleep at all, right?
This morning it dawned on me. Every time I go to sleep, I have to trust someone, or something, beyond myself. Sleep is an invitation to understand that there is more to life than just me. A lesson that I do not live alone.
Also, every sleep is an act of dying to yourself. You let go and do so in faith that you will wake again to live some more. An invitation to humility, letting go, taking nothing with you. You can’t take your money with you to sleep. You can’t take anything to sleep with you. A reminder that you came into this world with nothing, and you are going to leave equally with zip, nil, nothing at all in the way of possessions.
Try this. Next time you go to sleep, try and hold your wallet or purse, your credit card, whatever. While you’re asleep, try and spend some of your money. See how it goes. Try it. The fact is, someone could come and take your possessions in your sleep and you wouldn’t even know it.
Maybe sleep is intended to teach us humility? Perhaps to keep in check any selfish independence that may rise in our hearts?
Now, today, love someone. Be kind to a stranger. Care for someone. Pray for someone. Take this to sleep with you and see if it stays with you regardless of what happens in the night. This is something that can’t be stolen from you, awake or asleep.
This is “storing up riches in heaven.” These are eternal. Acts of kindness last forever.
So next time you are ready to go to sleep, think of it as a trial run for entering heaven. Here I come Lord!
You can take the things you’ve done, and not the things you’ve won.
What lessons have you learned from sleep?
