On Sleep and Sovereignty

I did not get much sleep during my first round of chemotherapy at the hospital. This is just a little ironic since the overwhelming majority of my time was spent in a bed. Here’s what I had to work with…. nurses constantly taking my vital signs and giving me medications, IV pumps beeping in my ear, using the bathroom every 45 minutes (from all the fluids in those beeping pumps), moaning patients next-door, tubes and wires running from my chest in all directions, 24 hour on-camera surveillance, scurrying personnel during the occasional code blue, and startling myself with my own snoring since I was always lying on my back. If that doesn’t paint a good picture, then think of being thrown into a large fish bowl and cabled down to a bed that looks more like an instrument of torture than a Tempur-Pedic. Your background noise is more annoying than a Nancy Grace marathon and you have the constant urge to pee. Night-night.

I teach my psychology students about the importance of sleep. In fact, study after study has demonstrated how sleep relates to other areas of life. The third of your life that you should spend sleeping has profound effects on the other two-thirds of your life; in terms of alertness, energy, mood, body weight, perception, memory, thinking, reaction time, productivity, creativity, and safety. And this is just a short list.

I’ve often wondered, however, why God would design us so that a third of our lives would need to be spent sleeping. Seriously – that’s a huge part of our life.

I don’t have a full answer to this question. But I had a significant moment one night in the hospital that I thought I should share. I couldn’t until now because it was too difficult to discuss even with Shanda until recently. Since I’ve said transparency is the name of the game, here it goes.

You’ve read by now that I was moved to the Critical Care Unit for a while because my heart rate had dipped into the mid thirties. (Normal heart rate is 60-80 beats per minute, by the way). I have to confess that I was more than just a little nervous about going to sleep my first night in CCU. My heart rate was being constantly monitored, and the number was just above my head. I could check it anytime I wanted –and I checked it often. As long as I was awake, I could figure out ways to get my heart rate up – tense my muscles, stretch, get out of bed, breathe fast, hold my breath, etc. Honestly, I was unsettled about “letting go” and sleeping. My heart rate was hovering in the 40s I had no assurance my heart rate wouldn’t drop again to even more critical levels if I let myself drift to sleep.

No man likes to admit this, but I had a small crisis that night. I was scared.

Then something remarkable happened – something hard to verbalize, so hang with me. Through a few of my tears that night, I offered a pretty feeble but sincere prayer: “Lord, I gave my heart to You years ago and You saved me. Tonight, I give my heart to You again – literally – and I trust You with it. Make it beat however You want.”

I surrendered control. I gave up my heartbeat. I even gave up my family. I thought of Shanda and the boys and turned them over to Jesus. I visualized Jesus’ hands holding and massaging my heart. And I slept.

Over the next few days, I reflected on that experience and on sleep in general. I wonder if God designed us to need sleep as a way of reminding us of our dependence on Him. We work ourselves like crazy during the day to maintain some semblance of control over our lives. But each night we have to give it all up. For those of us who claim that God is in control, going to sleep each night is an opportunity to thoughtfully practice what we preach.

It’s not that we shouldn’t work hard and make good choices each day. We should. We should work to take care of our families and faithfully carry out whatever tasks God has given us. But at the end of every day we have a chance to give it all back to the One who is ultimately in control – and truly find rest.