With the dreaded medical procedure behind me, I roll back the bedcovers feeling confident. My mind’s still pleasantly misted from the anesthesia and the doc had good news. I should have no trouble sleeping tonight.
But nope. Hours later I’m like a flailing fish against my pillow-turned-torture-device, and my worries and cares have taken full advantage. Particularly the ones having to do with my adult kiddos. Really, Kit? You’re an empty-nest mother of faith with over thirty years in this game, and you’re still borrowing on tomorrow’s cares?
Certainly I’m more likely to be beset with worry when I don’t get to be the one to solve my loved ones’ struggles, when the only active part I play is to pray.
Lord of heaven and earth, why would I think that if You’re not working through me, You’re not working? I know better. I’ve watched You faithfully carry out Your job description on battlefield after battlefield.
By rote, I name a few of those historic battles, recount His victories. Still, fears taunt.
And the spinning wheel spins. I add boldly colored threads of praise I don’t yet feel. I coax my laments into petitions for help. What am I weaving here anyway? It’s inglorious. It’s forever incomplete.
Oh. I see now. I’m staring at the shabby underside of my life’s tapestry. The raggedy mess only God knows, only He might call beautiful.
This is the fray. Here’s where my blanket of trust gets built. Every time I go to the mat with Him I tease a few threads of fear into fibers of faith.
Over and again, I answer darkness and deception with light and truth. Toss, pray. Turn, recite Scripture. Now repeat.
I meditate on the Wendell Berry poem I recently memorized, a favorite new element in my sleepless-in-central-Oregon ritual.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
At last I sleep, victorious. I know this because sunlight awakens me like a friend and there’s a Matt Redman anthem spooling between my ears.
Kneeling on this battleground, seeing just how much you’ve done. . . . You are faithful. God, you are faithful.
When dawn glows and the robins are back bouncing across the lawn, I know these lyrics are true. Why are they so hard to internalize at 2 a.m.?
Because here’s when we wrestle and here’s where we weave.
When beauty’s concealed in shadow and we’ve exchanged our clothes of busyness for a draping of fatigue.
When we can’t deny there are hard edges to life even flannel bedclothes can’t soften.
Where we’re trapped alone with our questions, only to discover we’re not alone.
Where we’re confronted by our faithless flesh and find holy empathy, not wrath.
My friend Renee tells me she sleeps fine at night, instead airing her fears and disappointments to the Father during her morning quiet time. It isn’t pretty, she confesses. Still, whenever and wherever we wrestle to rest “in the grace of the world” as Berry so beautifully puts it, we get incrementally better at staying in our own lane and out of God’s.
And eventually . . . maybe . . . we might even learn to accept our humble assignment on the current battlefield—
Kneeling.
And knowing.
If not, we’ll find grace for this too.
So tonight I’ll lay my worry-prone flesh down with a different kind of assurance. Not that I’ll sleep undisturbed. But with the promise that, even if I wrestle to rest, tonight’s tangle will become tomorrow’s tapestry.
God willing, I’ve got skeins to go before it’s complete.
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