Sleep Is One More Thing I Am Failing At

The first thing you did this morning was read a number.

Before you had spoken to anybody. Before the kettle. You picked up the screen and looked, and it said fifty one, and you felt something go down in your chest, and the day started from there.

Fifty one out of a hundred.

And you know, if somebody asked you directly, that a small device on your wrist cannot really know how you slept. You would say that. You would say it in a slightly amused voice.

And you looked anyway, and you believed it anyway, and by half past seven you had already decided what kind of day this was going to be.

Here is what has happened, and I do not think you have seen it clearly yet.

You have turned rest into a performance with a score attached, and the score is published to you every morning before you are properly awake.

And it is not only the number. That is just the most visible piece.

You have a bedtime you consider correct and you know when you have missed it. You have a view about what a good night is. You know your average. When somebody asks how you slept you give a figure rather than a feeling, and there is a small flinch when the figure is low.

Sleep has become an area of your life in which you can succeed or fail, and lately you have been failing at it, and it has joined the list of things you are not doing well enough.

Which is a strange thing to have happened to the one part of your life that you spend unconscious.

This is the last article on this site, and I want it to take that off you rather than add one more thing.

So I will say at the beginning what this article does not say. It does not say that a person who truly rests in God sleeps well. I am not going to write that sentence, or a softer version of it, anywhere.

I will give you rest

There is an invitation in Matthew, and the word to watch in it is give.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28, King James Version)

I will give you rest.

Give. Not award, not release once conditions are met, not return in proportion to effort. Give, which is the language of a gift, and a gift is not the thing you receive at the end of a performance.

And look who is invited. All ye that labor and are heavy laden.

Not the well ordered. Not people who have got their evenings right. The ones already carrying too much and already worn out from the carrying, which is the condition you are in and the condition you have been treating as a disqualification.

You have been trying to arrive at rest as somebody who has done rest correctly. The verse addresses somebody who has not, and does not ask them to improve first.

Now here is the part that matters most, and I want to be exact about it.

The rest in that verse is not a night's sleep.

It is not promising you seven hours. If it were, then every believer with a difficult body would be evidence against Christ, and that is a monstrous idea and it is not true and I will not have it in this article.

What is being given is rest in the older and larger sense: the ceasing of a certain kind of labor. The end of striving to be acceptable. A settledness that a person carries whether the night was good or not.

So you can have that rest and still lie awake. Those are not in contradiction. And on the night you lie awake with it, you are not failing at anything, because nothing there was ever being scored.

Rest is given to you and not awarded to you, and being worn out has never once been a disqualification from receiving it. Matthew 11:28 invites the ones already laboring and heavy laden and gives rather than grants, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody who has been trying to qualify.

Nobody is keeping the score but you

Here is the practical half, and it is about the account you think exists.

There is no account.

You have been living as though somewhere there is a record of your nights, and the run of poor ones is being noted, and it counts against you. Ask yourself plainly who is keeping it.

Not God. That verse hands out rest to the heavy laden without asking how their week went.

Not the people around you. Nobody in your house has any idea what your average is and nobody has ever asked.

The device is not keeping an account either. It is producing a number from movement and it does not know what a good night is, and it certainly does not know what kind of person you are, though it has been telling you every morning at seven.

You are keeping it. You are the only one, and you are simultaneously the one being graded, which is why it never comes out well.

And notice what the grading does, because it is not neutral. Reading fifty one at seven in the morning tightens something in you, and that tightening goes into the day, and it arrives with you at eleven o'clock at night. A woman who has spent the day carrying a poor grade comes to bed defended, and defended is not a state anybody falls asleep from.

So the scoring is not a neutral observation of the problem. It is part of the machinery that keeps it running.

Stop marking it. Not to sleep better. Because there was never an exam.

The account you have been running against yourself has never once had anybody keeping it but you. The written word gives rest to the laboring and heavy laden without one question about the week they have had, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been marking her own paper.

Say thank you for the hours you did sleep

So here is the last assignment on this site, and it is one sentence.

Say thank you once, out loud, for the hours you did sleep, however few.

Out loud, in the morning, before you look at anything. Whatever the night was.

If you slept three hours: thank You for the three hours. If it was broken into four pieces and none of them felt like anything: thank You for the pieces. If you genuinely believe you did not sleep at all, and sometimes it does feel like that, thank Him for the dark and for the rest of lying down.

Once. Not a practice, not a gratitude routine, and there is nothing to keep up.

And here is why this particular sentence, on the last article, rather than anything else.

Because it is the only thing you can do in the morning that is not a measurement. Everything else you do at seven o'clock evaluates the night. This one receives it.

And notice what saying it does to the hours. Three hours, graded, is a fail. Three hours, thanked for, is three hours you were given. Nothing about the night changes. What changes is whether the night is a verdict on you or a thing you received, and that is the entire difference between the woman who gets up defeated at seven and the woman who does not.

Then get up and have the day. And if the day is hard because you are tired, it is hard because you are tired, which is a fact about a body and not a report on your soul.

You are able to receive the night rather than mark it, and those hours have never once been a verdict on anybody. Matthew 11:28 says I will give you rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody saying thank you out loud for three hours.