He Gives It To Them Sleeping

Aisling has not finished a prayer in about two years and she has stopped telling anybody about it.

The pattern is completely reliable. She sits down in the chair by the lamp, usually about half ten, usually with a blanket, and she starts. And somewhere between the second and the fourth sentence she is gone.

She wakes at one or two with a stiff neck and the lamp still on and the blanket half off, and she goes up to bed feeling like somebody who has failed at the easiest possible thing.

She said it to her friend Roisin once, in a car, and made a joke of it, and Roisin laughed, and she has not brought it up again.

Here is what she carries about it, and she is quite precise about it because she has thought about it a great deal at one in the morning.

She does not think God is angry. That is not the shape of it. What she thinks is that she is the only adult woman she knows who cannot manage four consecutive sentences, and that everybody else has some kind of evening with a Bible in it and a candle, and that she has been sitting in a chair falling unconscious mid-sentence for two years like a woman who has given up without noticing.

Her niece stayed over in the spring and slept on the sofa in that room.

And in the morning the girl said, over toast, not making anything of it, "You were talking last night."

Aisling said, in her head, oh no.

The girl said: "You said thank You for Roisin and then you said something about the roof and then you were asleep. It was nice. I stayed awake for a bit listening to it."

Aisling stood in her kitchen holding a plate.

Two years of thinking she was failing at something, and there had been somebody in the room for one night of it, and what that person had heard was not a failure. It was a woman thanking God for her friend and then going to sleep in front of Him.

You may have the same pattern. Whatever it is, whatever the chair is, and there may be a private and specific shame around not being able to do the simplest thing in the world for four sentences. And nobody has ever been in the room to tell you what it looks like from the outside.

Sleep Is On The List Of Things He Gives

There is a line in a short psalm about building and working that puts sleep somewhere nobody expects to find it.

"It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep."Psalm 127:2

For so He gives His beloved sleep.

Sleep is not the interruption in that sentence. Sleep is the gift. The psalm has just finished naming the exhausting things people do, the early rising and the late sitting and the anxious eating, and then it puts sleep on God's side of the table as something handed over.

You are being given something rather than losing something when you go under in that chair. Psalm 127 lists sleep among the things He gives, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line about builders and lands it in a lamplit front room at half ten.

And look at the word in the middle. His beloved. That is who the sleep is given to. Not the productive, not the disciplined, not the ones who finish. The beloved, which is a relational word and not a performance one.

You have been called beloved in the same sentence that hands you the sleep. That is what the written word does with the end of a tired person's day, and it is the Spirit of God who takes two years of quiet shame off somebody in about a paragraph.

Nobody Has A Better Evening Than You Think

Now the thing that has to be said, because a great deal of this shame is built on an imagined comparison.

Aisling's picture of everybody else's evening is not real. It is assembled out of book covers and mentions in conversation and one photograph somebody posted of a Bible and a coffee.

The actual truth about most people's evenings, if you ask them honestly, is a great deal closer to a chair and a lamp and about ninety seconds before something gives out.

That does not make it a lesser thing. It makes it the normal thing, and the version she has been measuring herself against does not exist in the quantities she imagines.

And more to the point, the measuring is the injury. Not the falling asleep.

You are not failing at something everybody else has managed. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a sentence about a God who has taken the actual construction of human beings into account, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that chair with you every night you went under mid-sentence.

And say the guard, because this is exactly where a kind thing turns into a task. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No length, no hour, no completion, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work at all. If you never finish another prayer as long as you live, you are exactly as much His at one in the morning with a stiff neck, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a new thing to fail at.