He Gives His Beloved

I committed the cardinal sin of the insomniac which is to never let caffeinated nectar pass into my bloodstream past 10am, which is why at 12am, slathered in CBD oil and lavender, I am still wide awake. The cause for caffeine was good: we attended Say Yes, A Liturgy of Not Giving Up on Yourself, by Scott Erickson (@scottthepainter), but the insomnia, oh the insomnia.

I used to write late at night. It was my best time. I’ve always lived with roommates and lived a full life on top of it, and so those dark nights when the world turned in, I turned on.

I do my best thinking and writing now, when the sky is dark and the dishwasher hums and the distractions are few and my spinning brain has a place to topple. But somewhere around the past few years I felt guilty for staying up late beside my early to bed, early to rise husband (who has never, ever made me feel guilty for having a different internal clock).

I keep calling it insomnia, but that probably makes the real insomniacs or mothers of infants or those who work the graveyard shift roll their eyes. I struggle to sleep. I struggle to get to sleep and then stay asleep and then feel really rested when I wake up. Some nights I lay there counting backwards from 10,000, breathing in five seconds and out seven, reciting poems I know by heart, counting my heartbeats, counting my blessings, trying to not count my anxieties. I do this for an hour, two, three, until I drift into a fitful sleep and then waken an hour later, where sometimes I begin the whole process again.

I used to believe those who struggled to sleep had guilty consciences, kept awake by the timber of their sins bellowing in their ears. But, as with most things, the older I got the more I realized how much more complex the world is than I thought it was at 20 or 25 or even 30. I’m not judging other 20 or 30 years olds, I’m just saying I had to believe there was an order to the world, formulas that worked, reason to the chaos my life was then, and my way to believe it was to believe that life was simple and 1 + 1 always = 2. Of course it does, in math, but not in life.

I don’t know a single person whose life turned out exactly how they thought it would.

Do you?

My husband, who turned 40 almost three years ago, and I, who will turn 40 next year, and my oldest friend who will follow shortly after, drove to the event together tonight. I remarked on the way home how I appreciated how much Scott spoke about 40. His own awakenings then. The work of others after 40. The time there is still left to do and be. I used to believe that 40 was over the hill and there was nowhere left to go but down, but more and more I am convinced that no one’s life turns out exactly how we thought it would. Which means, perhaps, not down, but up?

I feel as though I’ve been sleepwalking through a lot of my life the past few years. Surviving. Or, rather, realizing how much I’ve spent most of my life surviving and now my body and my mind and my spirit are saying, no, no friend, Lore, this surviving is not how it’s meant to be lived. You are not here on earth to merely survive.

A friend says today the world isn’t long for the earth (we’re talking about ecosystems and apple cores and leaving no trace) and I say I disagree. I think we’re here for longer than we think. I think we’ve hardly even begun to do the work God has set before us. I have to believe the good keeps getting better. I think I’m not the only one who sleepwalks through my life, though, earnestly believing with all my heart that the formula still works and life will still turn out like I thought it would.

My in-laws spent their whole lives moving, ever year, every other year, all over the world, until twenty years ago they bought the home a great-great-uncle had built with his own two hands on a street named after the family in a small town in Georgia, and there they live. After a whole lifetime of unpredictability, a home, roots, the promise of waking and sleeping and walking and talking and eating and living in one place for the long haul. Eugene Peterson wrote that “all theology is rooted in geography.” He was saying that place matters and our place in this world metaphysically matters just as much as our place in this world physically.

The predictability of sleeping and waking and eating and talking and moving through our days, one right after another, ebbing and flowing, speaking and listening to the liturgies of the ordinary—these are the way life turned out to be for most of us. “The punctual rape of every blessed day,” the poet wrote perhaps too evocatively. Not necessarily what we expected, not, perhaps, what we’d have chosen, but a life still and a good one if we’ll see it as such.

I struggle to sleep not because the litany of things I’ve done or left undone plays through my head each night, but because I am preoccupied by things that are far too wondrous for me, too lofty for me to attain: the future. The hem holding me in behind and before, the thoughts yet unknown to me, the ways yet unfamiliar to me. Tomorrow. The unknown. Next spring. Two years. Ten. Twenty. I laud contentment and faithfulness today, but only because I’m still doing math with my faith, preoccupied with the formulas of faith rather than with the faith itself.

To sleep is a gift but it is also an act of trust. It is something we both receive and something we give. It is the promise that a new day is coming but not yet. It is the guarantee that this day will finish. It is the blessed reminder that someday we will wake for good, but tomorrow we will just wake for tomorrow.

This is one of Scott Erickson’s illustrations. You should check out more of his work, or buy one of his books. We have his one on prayer and I really love it.