In His Sleep

In His Sleep.  In this new age called grandparenting, it is entertaining and somewhat enlightening to revisit newly remembered parts of the previous age we once called parenting. Twenty-seven and a half years ago, we didn’t have so many features on the simple, fold-away stroller as now exist on today’s strollers. Factoring the rate of change, tomorrow’s strollers may come equipped with cappuccino machines. When did car seats begin to have an expiration date? The wheels on the bus still go round and round, thankfully, but the classic melody isn’t played on a cassette tape player anymore; it streams on Spotify. Some baby monitors now need an app and tap water is no longer clean enough for rinsing off pacifiers.

A few sayings of babyhood still live on, however, such as: sleeping like a baby. But much like eating like a bird and swimming like a fish, sleeping like a baby is a seriously misplaced cliché. Who really thinks that sleeping like a baby is anything close to peaceful? The sleep of a baby lasts all of 20 minutes when we need her to sleep and 4 hours when we need her to wake up. Even when she is asleep, she punches the air and kicks the blanket, making faces and noises, half-way laughing or half-way crying. Although very cute, sleeping like a baby is a gamble at best.

The ones who really sleep well during babyhood are the parents, at least that is when they get a break from baby. Exhaustion is normal and anywhere is a potential napping zone. Baby wins the sleep war, as she should. Parents can sleep when they become grandparents.

The elusiveness of sleep combined with its essential nature is a detail that Solomon worked into one of his two recorded psalms (Psa. 72 and 127). Maybe he was observing infants in the palace nursery when he wrote Psalm 127. The English Standard Version translates verses 1-2, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Psa. 127:1-2). But the New American Standard Version better connects the eating and sleeping of verse 2 with the laboring and the watching of verse 1 by translating the end of verse 2 thusly, “For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.” It is vain to persist at laboring, watching, eating, and sleeping in one’s own strength without the understanding that “Unless the Lord builds … [and] watches … [and] gives” all that we need. It is impossible for us to provide for ourselves, even if we worked at it incessantly. It is easy, so to speak, for God to provide; he gives to us even while we are sleeping (i.e., unable to assist God in the work of provision). God doesn’t obliquely give sleep to insomniacs as much as he provides for us all things, even in our sleeping. We wake up and discover afresh that God has been at it all night.