God has made you to grow weary, to call it quits in our labouring, and to rest. John Piper said, “Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God”. I was created to rely on Him, to trust in Him, to run out of steam, to find myself incapable of doing it all. Unless God builds it, unless He’s in it all, all the labouring is in vain.
Sleep
Katherine Walden
I am about to go to sleep and so I turn over to Him all those people I have been carrying in my heart. He never slumbers, he never sleeps, he never fatigues, he never stumbles. I won’t pick them up again unless he prompts me to do so. His burden is light, his yoke is easy. He carries the heavy end of the load, always. I am just his kid, carrying what I can carry, and he is a good Dad and never gives me a burden that would discourage or harm me by its weight.
Alexander MacLaren
When He lays hold of us, He comes like the angel that came to Peter in prison in the dark and awoke him out of his sleep and said, “Rise! and follow me.” It is only when we get out into the street, and have been with Him for awhile, and the daylight begins to stream in, that we see clearly the face of our Deliverer, and know Him for all that He is…It is the knowledge of experience. It is the knowledge of love, it is the knowledge of union, and it is in order that we may know Christ that He lays His hand upon us.
Thomas Keating
Q. “What do you do when you realize you have been dozing?” (during prayer}
A. “If you doze off, don’t give it a second thought. A child in the arms of a parent drops off to sleep occasionally, but the parent isn’t disturbed by that as long as the child is happily resting there and opens its eyes once in a while.
James Stalker
Conscience comes to us in lonely hours; it wakens us in the night; it stands at the side of the bed and says, Come, wake up and listen to me! And there it holds us with its remorseless eye; and our buried sins rise out of the grave of the past; they march by in melancholy procession; and we lie in terror looking at them. Nobody knows but ourselves. Next morning we go forth to business with a smiling face; but conscience has had its revenge.