Reading
“I will both lie down and sleep in peace;
for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”
Psalm 4:8
Reflection
If you joined us for worship on Sunday, we were blessed to receive the ministry of Julian Davis Reid and Tramaine Parker through their presentation of “Notes of Rest.” Through song, instrumental music, and spoken word, they invited us into a new way of experiencing God’s presence in our communal act of worship.
For the last few days, I’ve found myself humming the refrains that Julian wrote and Tramaine sang. My current earworm is titled “As We Lie Down.”
As we lie down, Lord, give your shelter.
We can’t keep watch and get the rest we need.
As we lie down, Lord, help us rise again.
For one day, we’ll sleep forevermore.
When I heard the words, “we can’t keep watch and get the rest we need,” something shifted within me. This simple phrase captured a simple (but not easy) truth:
We can’t rest when we’re trying to keep watch.
Our modern lives give us the ability to watch nearly everything in real-time, whether we need to or not. We can watch current events unfold across the world. We can know the location of our family and friends at all times, whether we need to or not. We can monitor our bank transactions, health markers, email, calendars, and even our video doorbells. Our lives are filled with constant notifications inviting us to keep watch.
During Notes of Rest, Julian reminded us that paying attention is important. As Christians, we should be aware of what is happening in our communities and around the world. We can’t bury our heads in the sand when our neighbors are suffering or when injustice and oppression need our attention.
But there’s a difference between paying attention and keeping watch.
Paying attention involves noticing what is going on in the world and asking God, “What would you have me do?”
Keeping watch assumes that if I stop watching or if I stop controlling it, something might fall apart.
Sabbath requires us to confront that assumption.
In order to “get the rest we need,” we must trust in the goodness and power of God. We must trust that God is at work, even when we are not.
That trust does not relieve us from our responsibility to act. We must act in the times and places where God calls us to act. But it does relieve us from the burden of believing that everything depends on us.
Growing up, I used to have a really hard time falling asleep. Thoughts would race in my head and I would worry myself into exhaustion. Over time, I found “life hacks” that helped me get to sleep, but it wasn’t until I experienced God’s safety and deliverance through a particularly painful season in my life that I began to understand what it meant to truly lie down and sleep in peace.
I had experienced enough of God’s love and provision to know that I could loosen my grip.
When the psalmist writes, “For you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety,” he is speaking about the fact that lying down and sleeping is an act of faith. Each night as we lay our heads on our pillows, we set aside the problems of the day and trust that God will keep watch while we rest.
Where in your life are you still trying to keep watch? What might it look like to trust God enough to lie down in the safety of his loving arms?
Prayer
A prayer from Compline*, The Book of Common Prayer:
Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace. Amen.
*Compline, also known as night prayer, is the final prayer or office of the liturgical day in the historic Christian tradition of the canonical hours.
