By Jim Tune
Have you ever heard people brag about how little sleep they require? An article in The Spectator magazine highlighted this problem in modern America:
Our war on sleep is hard to miss. TV interviewers ask today”s hard driving achievers how long they sleep. . . . When the guest leaves, the interviewers bat the question around with each other, boasting about pulling “all nighters” or claiming “I”m OK with five,” revelling in a festival of one-down manship. If the standard recommendation of eight hours a night gets mentioned, it is treated with genial contempt.
Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, and Margaret Thatcher all got by on four hours sleep. Thomas Edison, inventor of the modern lightbulb, claimed to require only three hours of sleep a night. Any more than that, Edison said, would render a person “unhealthy and inefficient.”
Edison”s idea that sleep was a sign of laziness refashioned the way the world worked. People who clung to their traditional sleeping schedules were considered unfit for life in the new, industrialized world.
After a 1994 earthquake knocked out power, residents of Los Angeles called police to report a strange “giant, silvery cloud” in the sky above them. It was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before. Los Angeles is so lit up at night that airplanes can see the glow of the city from more than 200 miles away. According to astronomers, 91 out of every 100 people live in an area affected by “light pollution,” which occurs when artificial lights make the night sky more than 10 times brighter than it would be naturally.
The introduction of bright lights during hours when it should be dark threw a wrench into the rhythms of life. As many as 100 million birds are killed by crashing into brightly lit buildings every year across North America. Biologists point to artificial light as a threat to the environments of many organisms. Researchers say that electric light at night messes up our circadian clock. Researcher Thomas Wehr states, “We”ve deseasonalized ourselves. We are living in an experiment that is finding out what happens if you expose humans to constant summer day lengths.”
Television came with its late-night variety shows. Experts say today”s obsession with gadgetry is a significant factor in troubled sleep. Forty-two percent of us use our phones before going to bed, and often sleep with the pings and ambient light these devices create.
Lack of sleep is not a badge of honor. Sleep is a normal part of our created humanity. Everyone gets tired, as the Scripture acknowledges: “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall” (Isaiah 40:30).
I used to take pride in burning the midnight oil. Long days, long weeks, short nights. But Jesus slept whenever he needed to””even in a boat on a stormy lake. In Jesus, we see not only a pattern of sleep, but a concern that others should enjoy the same kind of rest.
There”s a moving statement at the beginning of the story of the feeding of 5,000 that reveals Jesus as compassionate leader. “Because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “˜Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest”” (Mark 6:31). And so they did.
Maybe you should too.
Well…Jesus did spend an entire night in prayer. 🙂