Asleep in the Middle of Praying

She gets into bed at ten past eleven, which is earlier than usual, and she is pleased about that in the way you are pleased about a small win.

She has a plan. She has had this plan since Sunday. Not a long thing. Ten minutes. The list she keeps in her head: her sister, the neighbor with the diagnosis, the thing at work, the thing with her son, and then, if there is anything left, something that is not a request.

She starts with her sister. She gets as far as the neighbor.

And then the ceiling changes shape a little, and the sentence she was in the middle of goes somewhere, and the next thing is the alarm at six twenty, and her hand is still on the cover of the Bible she never opened, and the lamp is still on.

Third night this week.

The first night she laughed at herself. The second night she was annoyed. Tonight, standing at the sink with the toothbrush in her mouth, something colder arrives, and it is not about the prayer at all. It is a sentence with a shape like a verdict, and it goes: this is what you are actually like.

Not tired. Not a woman who has been up since five and drove ninety miles and made two meals. Something more permanent than that. Something about the caliber of the person. If it mattered enough, she would stay awake for it. Other people stay awake for it. There are people who get up at five to do this and she cannot manage eleven minutes lying down.

So she carries that up the stairs, and she gets into bed, and she does not try tonight, because she has decided in advance that she would fail, and not trying feels marginally less humiliating than falling asleep again.

You know the ceiling. Yours might be a chair with a lamp beside it, or a car in the parking lot before a shift, or the same three verses every morning that you have read forty times and never once finished. And you know the verdict, the one that arrives on the third night and is never actually about sleep.

He gives His beloved sleep

Let me put the verse in front of you first, because it is the one people never quote at a tired person.

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

Read who the striving belongs to in that sentence. Rising up early. Sitting up late. Eating the bread of sorrows, which is a wonderful and terrible phrase for the particular flavor of a meal eaten while worrying.

And read what God does about it. He does not send a stricter schedule. He gives sleep. To His beloved. As a gift, in the middle of a psalm about how the whole house falls down if He is not the one building it.

You are on the receiving end of a gift there rather than the failing end of a discipline, and you were never told that sleep was the opposite of devotion. It is written that He gives His beloved sleep, and the Holy Spirit did not stand at the end of your bed on Tuesday night waiting for you to finish; He was the one closing your eyes.

I am not saying tiredness is holy or that a person should not want to pray. Wanting it is why the verdict hurt. I am saying the verdict itself came from somewhere, and it did not come from Psalm 127.

You have a Father who builds the house while you sleep in it, and you were not asked to hold the walls up overnight. The psalm says the labor is vain without Him, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is not standing over your bed with a stopwatch tonight either.

The first thing God did for the prophet was let him sleep

Now let me take you to a man having a much worse week than yours.

Elijah has just come off the biggest day of his ministry and he is finished. He walks a day into the wilderness, sits down under a juniper tree, and asks God to let him die. That is where he is. And then he lies down and sleeps.

Watch what happens next, because it is one of the tenderest passages in the book.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again.1 Kings 19:5-6

He ate. And he lay down again. And the angel came a second time and made him eat a second time, and said the journey was too great for him.

No rebuke. No inventory of his failures. No question about his commitment. God's first ministry to a man at the end of himself was a meal and a nap, twice, before a single word of instruction.

You are being treated the same way in this bed, and you were never the exception to how He handles the exhausted. It is written that the angel said the journey was too great for him, and the Spirit of God is not less gentle with a woman who drove ninety miles today than He was with a prophet under a tree.

And there is a night in a garden where the closest friends Jesus had could not stay awake for one hour while He was in agony. He came back and found them sleeping, and He said the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41).

Sit with what that sentence is. It is a diagnosis, not a sentence handed down. He named the body's weakness accurately, out loud, and He did not revoke anything from them, and eight weeks later they were preaching in the street.

You have your body named as weak by the One who made it, and you were not required to overcome it before He would keep you. Matthew 26:41 has the willing spirit and the weak flesh in the same breath, and it is the Spirit who holds the willing part when the flesh has run out of road.

Somebody stayed awake

Here is the thing I most want you to have, and it is the hinge.

You fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about your neighbor with the diagnosis. So the question that has been sitting under the verdict is: what happened to that prayer. Did it stop where you stopped. Did it fall on the floor with the unopened Bible.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

Two of you were in that room. One of you went under at eleven twenty. The other did not, and has not, and will not, and was holding the neighbor and the sister and the thing with your son all night while you were not there for it.

You are not the one keeping this vigil, and you were never the only one awake in that house. Psalm 121:4 says the One who keeps you neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Holy Spirit was in the room the entire time your mouth had stopped working.

And there is more than that. Paul says the Spirit helps our infirmities, because we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and that He Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26). Look at what that means for a woman who cannot finish a sentence. The praying did not depend on your articulation. Somebody takes it up.

You have an intercessor who was already praying before you started and who did not stop when you did, and it is already His work and not yours. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit makes intercession with groanings that have no words in them, so a prayer that trails off into sleep is not a prayer that failed to reach.