Sometimes I do not like my body. Especially at 3 am when I can’t sleep. Insomnia is an unwelcome nocturnal companion. It’s in my genes. I can’t get rid of it.
In my better sleepless moments, I pray for patience. Or I try to think good thoughts. In my worst moments, I am angry. God knows I need sleep. I have a big day tomorrow. If I can’t sleep, I won’t be able to wake up for my devotional time (which I really do love) and then I will be tired the rest of the day. Come on, Body, go to sleep!
I have had this conversation with myself, with God, and with my body so many times that it is getting boring.
Then one day I began to wonder why God created humans to need sleep. Why would God create us to work, and play, and love, and then keep us incapacitated for about one-third of our lives? Perhaps, I mused, because when we are asleep we are totally out of control. Surrendering to God’s control is our lifelong spiritual journey.
Enter a personal theological insight: If sleep is a time when we are out of control, then my sense of being out of control when I can’t sleep may be transforming me. Insomnia may be a spiritual discipline of learning that I am not in charge of my life. When I am asleep, I am out of control. When I am lying awake, I am also out of control. My theology of sleep tells me that either state of being is a place of surrender.
As I have learned to welcome my insomniac moments, I am finding my self surrendering to God a bit more even when I am awake. That is a good thing.
Join the Conversation
Have you experienced that out of control place in either sleep or sleeplessness? How have you responded to it?
What other aspects of bodily life might God be using to help us surrender more fully to Him?
 Alice Fryling is a spiritual director and the author of several books, including The Art of Spiritual Listening: Responding to God’s Voice Amid the Noise of Life (WaterBrook Press) and Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction (InterVarsity Press).
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Interesting thought. For me, times of wakefulness in the middle of the night look more like wrestling with the anxiety- as if I could figure out something in the middle of the night that I couldn’t understand during the day.
If I reframe it as a time of surrendering control, maybe God could do some work in me.
I LOVE the idea that insomnia may be a spiritual discipline to teach us to surrender! I’m being weaned off a prescription sleeping med. after taking one for a few years. My body is gradually getting back into its former rhythm, and I have missed the control I had when I could decide when to go to sleep. Life is so much easier when I run it.
But it is so much richer when we allow God to move within us.