“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” Zephaniah 3:17
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. My husband, Mike, and I have been going through a lot of changes at a time of life when I expected to be beyond that kind of chaos. We’re selling a house, my husband is job-hunting, we’re combining households, sorting through possessions, and letting go of what won’t fit. We are busy with the added element of suspense as to how it will end. I’m tired when I get in bed. I’ve lain for hours waiting for peace.
I feel more sympathetic now toward the drug-addicted babies I used to care for in the NICU. They were nearly incapable of relaxing, their hypersensitivity to their surroundings needing to be overcome by other, one hoped, more pleasant sensations. I spent hours cradling infants to my chest, swinging them rhythmically while shushing them with silly songs based on their names. An hour might go by before I felt their tight little muscles relax a bit, even longer before their eyelids began to flutter. Sometimes they couldn’t be laid down to sleep before their next feeding time.
I sometimes imagine Jesus shushing me softly and overcoming my anxiety. The wisest man who ever lived said, “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” (Psalm 127:2). I relax a little in Jesus’s arms and remember His Father is with me, too. He delights in me, exhausted as I am, and I’m quieted like a baby sung to sleep.
Faith Step: Do you toil anxiously, too? It can be hard to gear down and relax. Imagine Jesus acting lovingly to you in the midst of it all.
