Fainthearted Slumber

Sleep is a wonder.

As a child, it's viewed as an unwelcome interruption that hushes pretends and half-coordinated grand schemes. Occasionally (or, well... more regularly) protests explode before a toddler surrenders themselves to rest. Those hot, exhausted tears on flaming cheeks and shrieks of misery are blinding. All wonder, all joy, it is coming to an end!

But eventually, Rest takes a small fingered hand, dries the tears, and kisses sleep onto those reddened eyes. Mother's caress, Father's embrace, becomes a haven. Their arms no longer hamper little wishes. They are a harbor for journeys familiar as night, and as new as the morning.

Sleep is so secure, so trusting.

Now we are older, but sleep can still carry a touch of the abstract. Sometimes sleep is as difficult to appreciate or attain for me as it was for the little Rebekkah who protested against nap time with tears that betrayed this was exactly what my exhausted toddler body needed. For myself and my peers, sleep can still carry associations of defiance. There is the conscious effort to push away drooping lids to experience and accomplish more, more! We try to make more time by stretching it out... futilely. Or we try to make time disappear by quickly sailing through unconscious night the vessel of deep rest. But instead of arriving on the longed-for shores of the morning, we become painfully aware of our fitful wrestling against sleep beckoned that will not come.

My mind doesn't always catch the signal from my worn-out limbs. As the fog of calculated cognition dissipates, my thoughts crystallize into pointed diamonds that prick my tired body. They descend like slivers of light from the yawning expanse of darkness to hold my head hostage. Though ready to cross over, my thoughts flit into unexplored burrows, keeping me bound with scintillating jabs of incessant distraction. I cannot cross over yet. Like calculated counter attacks to my tired limbs, thoughts begin to descend, cutting tangents into the draped sky to lengthen it's dark expanse. I am kept still, not yet entering into the land of slumbering release.

Nights like these are unwelcome, but they help me journal more readily. Sleep is a treasure.
How blessed we are in the confounding truth that strength is given through weakness. So much stock is set in activity achieving, and, yet all this is impossible without the antithetical posture of sleep - to rest and be. In the Sabbath lies our strength.

This past Thursday I found myself in Nashville, TN to see my sister and some wonderful friends perform at the Grand Ole Opry. Music lingered in my memory as the clock struck midnight, but with the show over, it was time to make the trek home with my sister and our friend. For an hour the two of us just talked on the porch steps while my sister slept. Against a symphony of crickets in the dark, the door opened to bring us inside so she could gather her things for her flight home at dawn. By 2:30am we were on the way to the airport. She and I said our goodbyes, the first of many that following day. I'm saddened that I won't see her as often now, but that actually makes the anticipation of heaven so much sweeter. Goodbyes won't be a part of the common tongue there.

Shane Salzwedel

As I drove back to the house where my sister and our other friends were already sleeping, the world began to change. At first, it was just a slight thing. A wisp of white hung low over a tree top. Then, wisps drew deeper breaths and became clouds, hanging like a dust sheets over invisible pieces of furniture above the road. Lights began to smear in the distance. The thin sheets of cloud turned into curtains and began to coagulate, thickening, spreading. Mass, color, light, and form disassembled themselves from each other. Solids became permeable as all the world was smudged. It was a dream world, but was I awake or sleeping? I thought of giant fingers messily holding the sphere of time I now passed through. A handful of headlights probed the dark, but could only see so far past the foggy fingerprints, not nearly far enough to frame this evanescent world and discover where it belonged.

John Bainbridge

It was 4am when I found myself back at the house. I wanted to hang there, suspended between the morning and night, between waking and sleeping. Would it be possible to rest there in the space of the night? To think and pray and wonder in solace until the dawn? I grabbed my knitted blanket and tiptoed past those slumbering and onto the front porch. Logic was fleeting in this odd hour as I curled up by myself on the wooden bench and faced the road.

I paused to rest my head on the arm rail and watch the speeding cars go by. Thoughts skated lazily as I inhaled the thinning night air. No sharpened star dust to pierce me awake tonight. Across the way, roosters began to crow, sunrise still an hour away. It might have been an age. Was this the morning? Was this still the night? Perhaps I choose to stay and find out. Perhaps I wanted to preserve this incomprehensible state of waking. Perhaps, like a dream, I have forgotten why I did it at all. Thoughts, like dreams, don't make sense that late, or that early. Still, they come. Why does the cock crow when there is still no sign of morning? Why do cars insist on rushing by in the dead of foggy night? Why do I choose to sit here and not to go to bed? It was all a bit surreal sitting on that porch until 5am while the house slept, just me and the neighbor's roosters. Yet, while it happened, it's hard to remember why. It's almost as if I dreamed while waking.