In Quest of Rest...

I am in the middle of my 3rd year of medical school and am currently on my pediatric rotation. I am absolutely enamored with the kiddos I see every day; I am sold on pediatrics as a future career. I have spent a ton of time at the hospital these past two months while on this rotation trying to soak up as much as I can about taking care of these precious kids. I have also been on "Q4 call," which means that every 4th night I, along with a team of 3 residents and another medical student, am responsible for admitting patients from the ER who have to stay overnight in the hospital or for checking on certain patients who are more sick than others and need close monitoring. When I'm on call, I'm at the hospital for about 30 hours straight and I get on average 4 hours of sleep somewhere in there. Needless to say, I'm pretty tired.

I know that being tired is part of the territory for medical students; all of us in the medical field are chronically sleep deprived. But a few nights ago as I was getting ready to curl up in bed and fall asleep to an episode of The Golden Girls (which I have done religiously since junior year in high school), I thought to myself, "I wonder why on earth God made it so that we require sleep. Wouldn't I be so much more productive if I didn't need to sleep and if I weren't exhausted all of the time?"

My alarm went off at 5:30 AM the following morning and I grabbed my John Piper devotional before padding out to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. I flipped open to the next devotion in my book and, I kid you not, the title for that day was "In Quest of Rest: Pondering the God-Centered Purpose of Sleep." Tell me that God does not have a sense of humor about these kinds of things!? Piper also asked the question of why God designed us to need sleep. He says that we sleep 1/3 of our life away. Think about that - and think about all that we could accomplish had God designed us not to need rest at the end of every day? Surely He could have designed us this way, so why didn't He? Piper quotes Psalm 127:2 in order to answer this question...

"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 in his sleep"

(author's translation).

According to Piper and to the psalmist, sleep is a gift of love - a daily reminder that our God holds us in His hands and that we should not be anxious about anything. Peaceful sleep is the opposite of anxiety, and God wants His children to trust Him. Thus, Piper concludes that "God made sleep as a continual reminder that we should not be anxious but should rest in Him." Being a medical student, I loved this illustration: "Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease, God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day."

It is also a reminder that we are not God. God is infinite and inexhaustible, we obviously are not. Sleep is a parable, Piper says, that tells us that God is God and men are mere men. "God handles the world quite nicely while a hemisphere sleeps. Sleep is like a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: Man is not sovereign..man is not sovereign....man is not sovereign..." God is not nearly as impressed with my staying up late or rising early in order to "get the work done" (which is in a sense me wanting to take care of everything myself) as He is with "the peaceful trust that casts all anxieties on Him and sleeps."

"His delight is not in the strength of the horse,

nor His pleasure in the legs of a man; 

but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, 

in those who hope in His steadfast love."

Psalm 147:10-11