Originally published on June 14, 2010.
No one ever told me that the biggest change in my life after I had a baby would be in the quality and quantity of my sleep. Okay, maybe that wasn’t quite the biggest change, but if not, it at least rates a close second.
Post-baby sleep is never quite the same as pre-baby sleep for a number of reasons. First, it’s often interrupted by the aforementioned baby. When she’s little, she wakes up during the night to be fed. When she grows a little older, she wakes up during the night to be entertained. When she moves to a toddler bed or big-kid bed, she doesn’t have to resort to crying and waiting for you to come to her. Instead, she comes to you, for any and every reason—another drink, another story, another nightmare—including the old stand-by, that she just plain needs mama.
You don’t get to go to bed on time anymore, either, because you have to stay up late doing all the things you didn’t have time to do while your child was awake. Nor do you get to sleep in ever again, because many kids don’t understand that just because the sun’s up doesn’t mean they have to be up.
Then there are the times you can’t get to sleep because you’re lying there tossing and turning over some issue you’re having to help your child get through. Or you wake up in the middle of the night, and your brain clicks on, trying to resolve the problem.
Most moms I know seem to be walking around with a sleep debt of several years’ worth, at least. I’m certainly no exception.
We moms are made to need sleep. We don’t function at our best without it, though somehow, we do still function.
Fortunately, God doesn’t have to sleep. Ever. Though you and I feel like we’ve been awake for thousands of years, He really has. He is constantly alert and watchful, continually guarding, preserving, and guiding us, and He always has been. He can run the entire universe without a single minute of sleep because He is that powerful. Lack of sleep never causes Him to get confused or cranky, like it does us. He never needs to take a break and get some rest so that He’ll be able to get back to work. No, He is infinitely far above our mortal, limited bodies.
How often we take His constant, unfailing care for granted. We fall into bed, exhausted, without so much as a thought for the One Who’s going to stay up all night taking care of us while we sleep. In fact, He performs the same ministry to us during the night as we do for our own children: He makes Himself available any time we need Him.
So tonight, when you go to bed, take a minute before you fall asleep and thank God for still being on duty taking care of you. You may want to praise Him for His inexhaustible strength and sufficiency, too. After all, when you think about it, He is truly amazing.
Psalm 121:4—Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.