Day 4: Genesis 8-10; Matthew 4:12-25; Psalm 4:1-8; Proverbs 1:20-23

“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8 NIV)

If you’ve been reading for the last three days, you can see that a theme is emerging in our scripture meditations! I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting that our first topic of 2024 would be sleep, but the Lord is obviously speaking deeply to me in my own life about my thoughts and feelings around this. I hope you are able to relate and meditate on these scriptures along with me.

In my obsession with my child’s sleep and helping to improve it, I have read countless items on safe sleep recommendations. We absolutely do not need to get into all of that here, but it created a huge fear in my heart around my sleep and my child’s sleep. I read articles, I watched videos, and after a very short amount of time, my social media pages were suggesting videos based on baby sleep. This was the first time I watched a video of a mother explaining how her child had died of SIDS. My baby was asleep in the bassinet next to the bed, and I cried and cried, imagining the heartbreak I would feel if something happened to my sweet baby boy. I had already experienced deep loss in the form of three miscarriages before his pregnancy, and the fear of having gone through so much during that pregnancy and birth, and then losing him was too much for my heart to comprehend. Thankfully, I realized pretty quickly how these thoughts would consume and overtake me if I wasn’t careful, so I meticulously thought of every hashtag and keyword I could block so those items wouldn’t come across my FYP again.

As a side note, if you are struggling with similar doom scrolling, I would like to suggest you do the same. It was brought to my attention that letting something affect me so deeply when it HAD NOT TAKEN PALCE was allowing myself to carry an emotional trauma that was not mine to hold. Yes, we need to have empathy for those who have experienced those situations, but to carry it as our own trauma is unhealthy to us and our emotional life.

When we are asleep, we are in our most vulnerable stage–our breathing and bodily functions slow, we’re unaware of the world around us, and we are dependent on whatever measures we put in place when awake to make sure we are safe while asleep. It can be easy to let the enemy create fear around this–what if someone breaks in and hurts my baby (again, postpartum anxiety is a terrible burden and I identify strongly if you have experiences these thoughts); what if the swaddle comes loose and his mouth is covered; what if he’s sick and helpless and I am too deep in sleep to awaken and care for him?

I let all this and more keep me from sleeping in the moments when I was actually able to during my postpartum period. I took on all the accountability for keeping my little guy safe and protected, and while it meant that we established some great sleep habits, it also meant that I was not giving the emotional weight of his safety to the Lord. It fells like it would be easy to acknowledge I have done all I know how to do, and now I must trust the Lord with the rest–but in practice it can be very difficult to accept while placing fears and concerns in His hands. There are things we don’t know and always things we could be doing “better.” But if you let the weight of that into your life, you will be emotionally crushed by the burden and unable to act and live in any sort of healthy way.

The Lord is calling us to lie down and sleep in safety. Sleep is the ultimate show of our relinquished control to him. We can do all that we can think of and plan for to make ourselves feel safe, but the Lord is the only one who can ensure that we are in fact safe and sound. Of course this does not mean that anything is guaranteed, but can we trust God that if something were to happen, He has a reason and a plan? It’s difficult to accept, and takes time, but only He can preserve and guarantee our lives. HE is the only one to give us peace and safety each moment of our physical lives.

Today I’d invite you to ask him if there is a door to fear open in your life concerning sleep. What would it look life for you to turn this fear over to him and close this door? What would it look like to not fear sleep, but rather to accept the peace and trust that comes along with it? I pray that we can all accept this peace and recognize our own inadequacy. It will take time and repetition, but turning over our fear to the Lord will make us better parents, better people, and more reliant on the creator, preserver, and governor of all things.