tithing sleep

It’s not even noon, and I can hear my kettle hissing for the third time this morning. I’m not drinking a pretty little cup of tea; I’m pour-overing a strong black coffee. I’ll drink coffee even if I’m wide awake because I love it. I’ll drink decaf at night simply to have something warm, tasty, and dark in my hand. But I’m gulping it now out of survival, which seems ridiculous because my youngest child is nearly three and a half years old. We should be out of the zombie stage by now. Or so I thought.

But my oldest, who until recently has slept like a champ, can’t seem to stay in his bed. He gets up and moves after we’ve tucked him in (we’ll find him anywhere: curled up in a dresser drawer, in our bed, under my husband’s desk, behind the leather chair in our piano room). In the night, he inevitably crawls in between us. And our daughter regularly wakes us to help with something (in my opinion) trivial: blankets untucked and disheveled, an empty water bottle, a trip to the potty. Both wake from nightmares or struggle to fall asleep because of their fears: volcanoes, bad guys, whatever might be lurking behind the cracked closet door.

At the same time, I’m trying hard to go before the Lord before the day begins. My alarm jolts me out of dreams, or reminds me that even though it feels like the middle of the night, it’s time to rise. My children aren’t sleeping. I’m not sleeping.

Psalm 127:2 speaks directly to the exhausted parent: 

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.

This verse is not a license to ignore my alarm clock, but a reminder that I can’t do anything outside of the grace of God. Even sleep. I may feel that I live split lives, one secular and the other sacred, as though my time at church, in family worship, and in community is somehow more holy than catching up on laundry, baking a pumpkin bread for breakfast, or taking a nap. This psalm confirms that even something as mundane and regular as sleep is not a purely physical event, but a gift from a gracious God who knows our needs and meets them. I should work and eat the bread of my labor, but my work should not be anxious toil. I have no need to be anxious for anything,[1] and toil is a labor that fails to produce fruit or value.[2]

Immediately after reminding us that God loves us and gives us sleep, the psalmist declares:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.

Our children are not barriers to a better night’s rest; they are a blessing from our Father, even when they interrupt our REM cycles. Our fruit is not produced by our toiling, but by the Lord granting children.

As believers, sleep is not the only thing that we give up in joyful obedience: if we tithe, we rhythmically give back to the Lord a portion of what he has already given us. Tithing reorients our view of our finances and our illusion of control; it is a way to declare that God can do more with our ninety percent than we could do with one hundred percent. He can do more. We lose nothing by tithing; we only gain, by participating in his kingdom work.

Sleep is the same. Maybe we should view the hours lost, the dreams cut short, as a sort of tithe. We sacrifice our hard-earned rest, but God can do more with the hours we do sleep than we would do with the ones we seem to have lost. And maybe we should see these minutes as an offering, not something deserved that was stolen from us. We can tithe our sleep. We can trust that God has gifted us our children, and he will do more with our shorter nights than we could do with long periods of rest.

Psalm 127 not only promises that God will give his beloved sleep, but also that he has already given us the gift of children. In some seasons, we may feel as though we’ve only received the latter gift and not the former. And while we can go to our Father and ask for rest for us and for our children and trust in his goodness, we can also give back the nights that we want to keep for ourselves. We can sacrifice our sleep with gratitude, not resentment.

My coffee is half-drunk now and growing cold. It may not be enough to carry me til bedtime, but praise the Lord I have something greater to carry me further. I don’t live on coffee or sleep alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.[3] He is always speaking. And I am always carried.

[1] Phil 4:6

[2] Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2017), 85.

[3] Deut 8:3