Meditate | Lost Sleep, Gained Hope

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments, or better yet, your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

The Lord's divine providence works things out so that what is both evil and false promotes balance, comparison, and purification, which means that it promotes the union of what is good and true in others...

The Lord provides for the union of what is good and true in others by purification. This happens in two ways, by temptations and by fermenting. Spiritual temptations are simply battles against the evil and false things that breathe forth from hell and affect us. These battles purify us from things that are evil and false, so that goodness in us is united to truth and truth to goodness.

Spiritual fermenting happens in many ways both in the heavens and on earth, but people in our world do not know what these processes are or how they happen. There are things that are both evil and false that are injected into communities the way agents of fermentation are injected into flour or grape juice. These serve to separate things that do not belong together and unite things that do, so that the substance becomes pure and clear. (Divine Providence 21, 25)

When I was in high school, I remember staying up until four in the morning and somehow enjoying sort of falling through the day, functioning as I could on less than four hours of sleep for days and days on end. I think back to that now and wonder why I ever did. As a teenager, I think there was an attraction to the sort of drugged-stupor you live in when you haven’t gotten sleep—a form of escape, a way to dull the senses, without the need of actually taking drugs or drinking alcohol! It felt good—when I was a self-absorbed adolescent, not responsible for the care of any other human being.

Now an adult instilled with the desire to serve and care for my three young children, not getting enough sleep is the bane of my existence. Sleep deprivation is the number one thing that repeatedly subverts my attempts at being the person I’d like to be for my kids. I get so frustrated about this—why on earth did the Creator set it up this way? Having several young children is inevitably coupled with not getting enough sleep to function properly, let alone happily, for long, long stretches—it seems like the worst recipe for healthy human relationships. As one mentor told me, “The Lord must love zombies, or he wouldn’t have given them the most important job in the world!” Caring for young children is the most important work in this world and here the Lord has entrusted me, a sleep deprived mommy zombie, to do it. Why?

My thoughts on the issue usually don’t go any further than that. I recognize the cruel circumstances in which I live, get frustrated not being able to make sense of it, and that’s about the moment when a child’s cries pierce their way into my consciousness.

Through the lens of this passage I now see sleep deprivation as the agent of my spiritual fermentation. I’ve read this quote before, and even reading it now, my first thought is that it’s a pretty weird idea to imagine the Lord somehow purposefully “injecting” spiritual communities with evil and falsity—the words conjure images of lab research on rats.

But thinking about it in the context of my life as a mother of young children it makes sense. Sleep deprivation gets conditions just tenuous enough that whatever latent misaligned tendencies I have can’t stay that way. They get riled up—fizzing if you will—when the agent “not enough sleep” gets mixed in.

I recognize I have spiritual farsightedness around this issue. Close up, in the moment of approaching another day on little sleep, it’s hard to grasp the wisdom of the Lord’s providence. By taking a few minutes to contemplate the idea in meditation, my vision of the Lord’s care clears; in actuality, the agitating circumstances of my life now are giving me a way out from bondage to hurtful ways of behaving that otherwise would go unexamined. The process is uncomfortable, but the outcome is well worth the work. 

Chelsea Rose Odhner

Chelsea appreciates the time for reflection writing this column makes her carve out. In addition to mothering her three young children, she is an assistant editor for New Church Connection and an editor and writer for New Church Perspective.