365 Days of the Great Names of God, Day 303: God of Our Nights

God of Our Nights

"By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life." (Psalm 42:8)

I've often wondered why God created us to need sleep. As the Master Designer, He could have ordained one long day after another and wired our bodies so that we just click along without fading.

Perhaps He did not make us this way because the God who Himself rested on the seventh day of creation (though not because He was tired but because His work was done) knew that unless He required us to rest, we never would do it. The fact that He formed us with this ongoing need tells us there must be something more than necessity to our nights. And not only to our literal nights, but to our spiritual nights as well. In both, there is regeneration, reorganization, resetting.

In our literal nights, our bodies' cells are regenerated, turned over, and renewed. I have zero medical background, but from my reading on this, I've gleaned that this regeneration can happen at night while we're sleeping because our bodies are not busy doing all the things of the day.

In our spiritual nights, we are also regenerated. Our faith is turned over. Damage is repaired. Healing is undertaken.

In our literal nights, our minds reorganize. I often tell my daughters that after they've studied hard for some test, sleep is not a waste. While they sleep, their minds are able to take all the information, facts, and understanding they've piled on it and sort it out, filing it away in the proper places. Like any good organizational system, this makes the information easier to retrieve when it's needed.

In our spiritual nights, our minds and souls reorganize. All the truth we know about God is like a giant stack of papers piled on our mental desks. In the nights of our faith, this truth gets sorted and filed so that we can more readily access, say, "hope" or "perseverance" or "peace" when we need it.

In our literal nights, there is resetting. Some of our bodies' mechanisms are returned to their factory defaults, as preset by our divine Manufacturer. We are powered down for a time so that, afterwards, we can be powered back up for another day.

In our spiritual nights, we are reset, too. In our waking, there comes a point when we are just spinning around a hamster wheel, trying to solve the same problem or deal with the same challenge. We are so deep into it that we cannot, as the saying goes, "see the forest for the trees." During the night, we cannot see anything and so we stop trying, stop straining our eyes...and then find, with the light of new day, that we can suddenly see what eluded us before.

The nights of our lives—physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional—are not just wasted space between our days. Night was created by the same God who made the day, and He called them both "good." 

And if, in our nights, we need a lullaby, He has given us one: "at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life" (Psalm 42:8b).