On the blessings of sleep.

Two nights ago, a miracle happened: I slept all the way through the night.

I have never been a good sleeper, not as long as I can remember.  I was one of those kids that would smuggle a flashlight into bed with me so I could keep reading, and when the batteries burned out, I would lie awake and finish the story for myself.  Unfortunately, that means that I was also the teen that would lie awake and rehearse all the worrisome conversations that I might have the next day.  I developed a bad habit of lying awake at night, thinking, revising, and just replaying thoughts real and imaginary over and over.  I'm a worrier.  I worry my life for more stuff to think about like a dog worries an old blanket to find a favorite toy.  And it's funny how the people who can't let something rest are the people who can never sleep.   But before now, I never had the motivation to do anything about it.   

When I first went to a therapist  for my post-partum depression, she suggested that sleep deprivation might be part of the problem and suggested drugs right off the bat.  I was nursing, and I was a Navy wife whose husband was about to go on deployment.  I had seen what psychotropic drugs could do to people if they weren't the right drug or the right dose.  A good friend of mine had two kids on medication, and it radically changed their personalities, even when it helped.  That's stressful when there's a responsible adult around to manage things, but since I was going to be the responsible adult, I decided that the risk was unacceptable.  I would take the flaws that I knew how to handle instead of imposing new ones on myself.  After all, if I went seriously nuts, who would take care of my beautiful baby?  I opted for a more natural treatment. 

That was my logic until Seth got out of the Navy.  I went to neurofeedback therapy, which helped enormously, but I couldn't seem to get over that last hill, and my therapist said it was because of my sleep habits.  I had a sleep study done, but I still didn't want to take medication.   I was coping.  It was good enough.  But since we moved here, I haven't had NFT, and normal sleep regulation wasn't helping.  I cut down on my computer time, stopped eating sugar before bed, and exercised (a little) more.  We even got a new mattress.  No success.  It was time to bite a personal bullet.  I went to the doctor and asked for a pill. 

 Monday night, I took my sleeping pill for the first time, and I slept.  I woke up once to put the Boo back to bed, and then I came back to bed and went right back to sleep.  (This never happens.)  In the morning,  I woke up slowly.  Man I was groggy, but I was also chipper; I was  buoyant; I was downright jaunty, and my natural tendency to cynicism hovered like an annoying fly instead of sitting on my soul like a big black spider.  I sat at the breakfast table and sorted through the day as a plan instead of a worry.  I worked my way through Bible study with a clear head and a sense of being settled in myself.  I took the Boo's little peculiarities in stride, and even appreciated them as the adorable traits that they are.    And, as I got in the car,  I turned on the Christian radio station, I listened to the words of a praise song, and I didn't have to rectify a feeling of cynicism.  Yes, God really is that good.  No doubt about it.  It's amazing what one little pill can do for a person's perspective.

Now, some people, and I know they're out there because I was one of them, think taking a pill to solve a chemical problem like a nervous sleep disruption is unnatural.  Some would even call it unbiblical.  "Truly my soul finds rest in God," they might say.  "All you need to do is take every thought captive, and sleep will come."  To this I reply from experience, "Sometimes the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."  When I was in the grip of depression, I knew that God is good and that he still holds me in his hand.  I knew that my husband loves me and that I'm doing a good job raising my kid.  But I didn't have the emotional strength to believe it. I didn't have the mental strength to look around me and perceive all the facts that supported my faith.   And faith has to come before health and healing. 

The same is true for sleep.  One of my favorite bloggers, Kevin DeYoung, posted something to that effect last week.  Sleep is a spiritual discipline, he writes, quoting from D.A. Carson.  If we lack sleep, our ability to believe is impaired.   If our ability to believe is impaired, then the capacity to trust God is damaged.  If the capacity to trust God is damaged, well, I couldn't sleep in a world like this.  It's just too crazy. 

So I'll take my miracle, even though it comes in a little orange bottle with a kid-proof lid.  Some things are just too important to power through on our own, and some things are truly beyond our physical ability to overcome.  The grace of God can come in little orange bottles.  The common grace, at least.  And common grace makes it easier to see salvation.