Unanswered

These days, I’m praying every night for sleep. Many times. I pray for it when I’m first lying down trying to shut off my brain. I pray for it when I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and fear I’ll be awake until dawn. I pray when I get out of bed in the morning that I’ll sleep better the next night. Sleep issues have been a constant in my life for almost as long as I remember (I wrote about them here nearly a year ago). I’ve had several sleep studies, seen many specialists, tried multiple remedies . . . and yet I still have seasons like right now where genuine rest eludes me. If I had a few thousand dollars lying around to cover my high deductible, I’d see a specialist again. But I don’t, so I just pray.

And pray. And pray. And I still don’t sleep as well as I need to.

There are many who say this is exactly why they don’t believe in a God, or at least in a personal God who loves us and is involved in our daily life. If a personal loving God existed, these people say, he would answer those prayers. He would give me the sleep I need. Obviously, I’m kidding myself, speaking to the wind.

And I’ll be honest that my tired brain goes there sometimes, briefly.

But I also have Christian friends who do believe in a personal loving God who say this is the reason they can’t bring themselves to ask God for things. What’s the point? He knows best. He’s going to do what he’s going to do anyway, so asking him for things is a waste of time and maybe even dishonoring to him. I mean, doesn’t scripture say that God doesn’t change his mind? What good is praying then? We should just be willing to submit to his will.

That’s kind of hard to argue . . . except that Jesus told us to ask him for things, didn't he?

“Ask, and it will be given to you,” he said. He told a parable about a neighbor knocking on the door in middle of the night with a request (Luke 11) and another about a widow who gets what she needs from an unjust judge by pestering him (Luke 18) – and Luke specifically tells us that last parable was to show us to “always pray and not give up.” Paul instructs elders to pray over others for healing. James says, “You do not have because you do not ask.”

This is the Word of the Lord (thanks be to God), so I ask. And yet, I still don’t sleep well.

Soooo, how do we reconcile this stuff? Some days, it’s harder than others, frankly. But I keep going back to the lessons I learned with my little girls, because being a mother changed my view of God completely.

Consider: God could have molded us all out of dirt like he did Adam and Eve, fully formed and mature. But instead, he had this brilliant idea of a long maturation process during which we are completely dependent on someone else. We really have no choice as children except to trust. He seems to have known we'd need a lot of training for this.

When my kids were little, they asked me for things all the time that I knew better than to give them. Often, they were too immature to understand the why, so I didn’t explain. But it was always for their good. I didn’t give them ice cream for dinner every day and let them watch Nickelodeon all night long -- and that was good and right of me, whether they realized it or not. If as a result they had decided that I was a terrible excuse for a mother and left home at six, that would have been a tragic and foolish mistake on their part.

So why do we operate that way with God? To judge God’s love or competence or even existence by the number of requests he acquiesces to . . . well, dang, that’s pretty stupid. For one thing, in the scope of all existence, we are children and have no understanding whatsoever of what is good for us and not good for us. But more than that, if our relationship with our Creator is just centered upon the asking and receiving of favors and blessings, it’s a pretty pitiful kind of relationship, one not worth pursuing.

But he IS worth pursuing. He is God, our Father, not our Santa Claus. Still, he wants us to ask, just like I wanted to hear my daughters tell me the desires of their hearts, even when I knew them already and even when I knew that giving them what they wanted wasn't love. I wanted to hear their hearts, and they needed to learn to trust my love. Our requests to God can strengthen our relationship as long as they are truly requests and not demands or expectations or bargaining. 

So, I continue to make my requests every night. Seven full hours of sleep, please. Even six would be nice. And thank you for listening.