21 Where do you Sleep?

My sleep has been a little wonky as of late. Two weeks ago, I was up at 5:30am ready to go, doing devotions, doing laundry and now, it’s 7:30 and I’m dragging myself out of bed. Sometimes stress makes you feel sleepy and sometimes stress gets you wired. What is sleep and God have to do with each other?

The Back Story (Jonah 1:4-6)

God made a storm. It was so huge that the ship was going to break up and the seasoned sailors were afraid. This wasn’t their first go-round on a tourist yacht. This was their career, since they were kids. They knew boats, they knew the sea and they knew that this one was gonna be BAD. The kind where sometimes people don’t go home afterwards. The kind where they wished they would have said “I love you” before they left this time, instead of the door slam they left behind… The kind that causes deep reflection, getting down to business of what’s really important in life, real quick…

They did what they could to make the situation better, but they knew that it was a long shot. Everyone knew it was God-intervention or die. They did what they could to appease their gods.

Except Jonah.

He was sleeping.

I can just imagine the captain going below deck, being tossed into the side of the ship over and over as he makes his way down there. Finding Jonah sleeping, I think he probably had a few choice words for Jonah (they don’t call it “swearing like a sailor” for no reason), but all that is recorded was “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not die!”

Thoughts

My husband says I’m a professional sleeper because no matter how upset I am at night and how much I complain that I just won’t be able to sleep because of a situation, I always fall asleep before he does.

I nap everyday at 2:00. I have for about 20 years. I even get dreams, like the one I had yesterday of walking through my forest with my long-haired child. It was wonderful. Somehow, sleep clears my head and I’m more effective the rest of that day because of my time in sleep.

Jonah was a sleep in the middle of a death-storm. I’m not sure how he would have stayed put in his hammock without smacking his head all over the place. But he certainly was sleeping.

When Jesus was at the hardest point of wrestling with His purpose and dealing with the humanity of dying in Gethsemane, He asked His friends to be there for support. They tried, but… fell asleep.

THREE TIMES (Matt. 26:36-46)

Jesus fell asleep in a storm much like Jonah. (Matt 8:23-27) There was a massive storm, intent on taking down every life in the boat. There were seasoned fishermen and there was a whole stack of fear. Jesus was sleeping.

There’s a difference between the sleep that Jesus had and the sleep of Jonah and Jesus’ supporters in Gethsemane.

Now, let’s be fair to those who sleep. Sleep after a trauma (or in the middle of trauma) can actually help. There are studies that show how sleep can improve the integration memory and emotion. Dr. Rebecca Spencer, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Department of Psychology says, “You can be driven to sleep simply by having a lot of emotional memories to process”. In a study done by Goldstein and Walker, they found that, sleep helps us remember the events of the trauma, but helps us forget the intense emotional upheaval part of the trauma. Fair enough.

But I suspect that wasn’t all that Jonah and the disciples were doing.

I wonder if the disciples were more into a gut response than simply processing. According to Dr. Curtis Reisinger, clinical psychologist at Zucker Hillside Hospital, a person can struggle with the garden-variety “fight or flight” response (a.k.a. run or punch the guy out) but they could have a freeze response “sort of like a deer in the headlights, they get stunned,” comments Reisinger. There are three more responses. Flooding is “where the person gets flooded with emotions,” the fawn response” which is a giving-of-oneself to the captor and finally the fatigue response, which involves any number of varieties of exhaustion. “When you look at a psychophysiological level at all of these, one of the reasons that people sometimes get so wiped out and even fall asleep is that whenever you’re put up to a lot of mental tasks or physical tasks, it uses up glucose in the brain,” says Reisinger. “Glucose is essentially sugar, and it gives you the energy you need. My thinking is that the most likely culprit, if you will, is depleted amounts of glucose in the brain.” Reisinger points out that babies zone out and fall asleep all the time, when faced with stress. “And that is akin to the metabolic exhaustion that goes along with glucose levels.” Because the brain is essentially a glucose-sucking machine, napping is a good way to restore depleted glucose levels most times and that will help with putting struggles into perspectives. It’s a stack better than going into other possible addictions (like stress eating, smoking, gaming etc.) For more on sleep, check this out: When Stress Make you Fall Asleep

When doing a google search, I looked up “spiritual reason for falling asleep” and I got stuff like, demonic insomnia, sleep paralysis and spiritually sleeping etc. But I didn’t get what I was looking for. I think that just like prayer can influence the physical world, the spiritual world can influence the natural world. As such, I think that the disciples struggled with a demonically influenced sleep, where they tried to fight it, in order to prayerfully support Jesus, but they weren’t strong enough, not even together, to stay awake.

Jesus wasn’t sleeping in the boat because He was demonically influenced nor because He was struggling so bad with His emotions that He needed to shut down. He was sleeping because He trusted His Heavenly Father for EVERYTHING, including his safety.

WHAT KIND OF TRUST IS THAT!?!

It’s Father’s Day today and my husband is not able to see all our kids today. But in that pain, we can trust our Heavenly Father to work all things out for His good and for his glory, regardless of the bad decisions made by those around us. God will not be tricked, His foolishness is greater than the wisest man. He loves us more than we can imagine and has good plans for us (Jer. 29:11). We can expectantly wait for all that is good from Him, and we can expect that He can and will save us. We can rest in the Father’s love. We can fall asleep in His arms.

Either way, God is God. His love for us can be trusted, my darling. You can fall into the arms of Jesus and stay there.