“You look even more tired than you did yesterday. You need to get some sleep.”
The hospital pediatrician spoke with a kindly concern on her face, but at three days postpartum with twin babies who were struggling to nurse, and after one of the most traumatic and painful deliveries imaginable, her words almost felt like a cruel joke. Later, as I looked at my impossibly pale face in the hospital bathroom mirror, the deep circles under my eyes thrown into harsh relief by the over-bright lights of the vanity, I felt the bitterness rising in the tightness at the back of my throat as I wondered, “And when would I do that exactly?
For the past three days we had been through the wringer. Struggling with latches from (then undiagnosed) lip and tongue ties in both of my tiny babies, blood sugar dips that had us reaching for fortified donor milk and glucose syrup, and round the clock nursing/pumping/bottle feeding sessions that left us with a meager ten minutes before we had to start all over again. When exactly was I supposed to be resting? Even when I did set a timer for those ten minutes and lay down and shut my eyes, my body hurt and my mind was tortured with flashbacks to the fear that consumed me only a few hours before.
I was angry that the suggestions for rest did not come with any follow up on how to actually achieve that rest. By the time my husband and I headed home a day later, we had only slept a cumulative six hours since arriving at the hospital four days earlier. Committed to staying awake on the drive home, we talked the whole way. The theme of that conversation was this: We were exhausted—not only physically, but mentally. This wasn’t the first wave in a sea of tranquility—the storms had been coming one after another for years.
“I’m so freaking ready for a new season,” I said.
“Me too,” he said.
That mutual weariness is ultimately what led us to putting an offer on a house only two weeks later—our sleep deprived brains and bodies somehow still able to accept this invitation to a new and surprising adventure. When I first looked at the internet photographs of our new home, it looked like a place I could lay my head down for awhile—though I wasn’t quite sure what that was going to look like in the coming months and years.
“We just have to get there,” I kept saying in the weeks leading up to our big move with two newborns. “Once we get there and get settled in, we can hibernate. We’ll take it easy this winter. We’ll rest.”
If only actually resting was as easy as deciding to rest.
Since Summer of 2018, just before I welcomed my third child earth side, I have been writing and learning about Sabbath in some form. It all began with a wonderful book called Rhythms of Rest by Shelly Miller, and in the midst of a season of deeply intense suffering and burnout, Sabbath became the lifeline that I needed. But since welcoming our sweet twins earth-side, I have struggled to make rhythms of rest a reality again. Between the demands of two babies, along with my three older children, and the season of darkness brought on by birth trauma and loss of our familiar community—I was left unsure how to receive this rest from God in the ways I was used to. The Psalmist says, “He gives to his Beloved sleep,” but in my darker moments I found myself wondering if that meant I just wasn’t that beloved anymore.
But dark moments don’t last forever—and in the pre-dawn light of another day full of new mercies, I began to wonder if perhaps during a season with less-than-adequate sleep, I am learning how to rest in ways that I never would have leaned into otherwise.
I know some of you can’t sleep either. And I know that you are tired.
Perhaps, like me, it’s the long nights of caretaking. Small children, medically complex loved ones, or aging parents, can all require significant nighttime care. Or perhaps it isn’t a present neediness, but you find yourself with a deep grief gnawing at the edges of your heart and mind in the midnight hours. Perhaps you are up all night in the throes of illness. Maybe you suffer from insomnia. Maybe the deep fears of an uncertain future, or the pain of a tumultuous present keep you awake.
The dark circles under your eyes tell the story that you need rest, and though sleep is what your body craves, for one reason or another, you find yourself unable. Perhaps like me, every time some well-meaning person suggests you “get some rest,” your fingers clenching into a frustrated fists. Perhaps you, like me, have longed to know, “is there rest to be found when you cannot sleep?”
More than a few times during this incredibly intense season, I have found myself envying God. I have said things like, “Well of course he can be the perfect parent! He doesn’t need any sleep!” Two babies, double the variables. (Not to mention my other three kiddos who also occasionally need me at night.) With all my other kids, even when I wasn’t sleeping all the way through the night, I’d usually be able to count on at least a certain chunk of sleep. I could lay my head down at night, resting in the near certainty that they’d probably sleep until 3:30 am after their last feed in the late evening.
But with these babies, I have been forced to wave goodbye to all expectations. Every night has been different—rarely have we found ourselves in a groove of anything familiar. For the first few months before we were able to revise the twins’ lip and tongue ties, I was cluster feeding from 7-11pm every night. My shoulders ached from hunching over for hours every evening and I had never met HUNGER like twin-breastfeeding-mom-hunger. It took me throwing out my back the week of my brother’s wedding to realize I needed a better nursing pillow.
After that was resolved, things were a bit easier, but for most of the first year I didn’t know what time I’d even be able to get to bed, because it seemed that one or the other of the babies was always restless in the early hours of the night. I was always needed. And I was always spent. But even the newborn days were nothing compared to the month after Nathan’s hernia operation when the twins were six months old. For two weeks straight I was up every 45 minutes all night, every night. (No hyperbole.) I could barely think of my own name, let alone what I should feed my children for breakfast. When that intense season ended, I began thanking God for “some sleep,” which I had discovered was infinitely better than “no sleep.” The struggle had made me all the more grateful for the daily bread—the every day provisions that helped me continue to put one foot in front of the other, even if that foot felt like it was made of lead.
I don’t say this for pity. In fact, I’ve been pretty quiet about how hard it has been in the public sphere, mostly because I have feared the erroneous advice, the unhelpful comments, or the angst that sometimes well meaning people feel on my behalf (which as an empath sometimes makes me feel guilty for making someone else “feel bad.”) All that to say, the reason that I am sharing this now is because I want you to know that I know. We might not have the exact same situation, but I want you to know that I understand just how hard it is when you aren’t getting enough sleep. And I still believe that God has REST for you (for us!) in this season, even if it doesn’t look exactly the way we wish it would.
On days with little sleep I tried my best to take care of myself in all the ways I could. I ate as nutritiously as I could. I chugged water. I allowed myself a cry in the shower. I took a moment to stretch. I admired the sunshine streaming through my bedroom window. I watched the sparrows pecking at the ground before the snow. I wrote poems on legal pads, or my kitchen chalkboard, or the backs of receipts or envelopes in the car in between appointments—because writing the beauty helped me to see the beauty.
Mostly I prayed a lot of short prayers like this one:
“Dear God, S.O.S. Amen.”
I hated feeling so fragile. I hated feeling so out of control. I hated feeling like I was always one cup of spilled milk away from a complete meltdown. But that’s what sleep deprivation does to you: it breaks you down. It makes you realize just how human you actually are. A series of bad nights can darken your mind more than you ever thought possible. When a nap can change your whole outlook on life, it can be a painful reminder of just how needy and fragile you have always been. And what if the nap never comes?
But along the ways, I have discovered as well that there is a certain kind of holiness in meeting the frailty of another being with your own frailty—God’s power, perfected in our weakness. When I had just had my second son and was struggling during those long newborn nights, a friend of mine began praying that God would “multiply hours of rest.” That he would make my limited sleep more restful that it should have been. That he would multiply it like he multiplied the fish in the net, and the bread on the beach. And I can confidently say in that season, the Lord answered my friend’s prayer in a way that empowered me to pray it again these past 17 months.
If I think it’s all up to me, I can easily become embittered and angry at God for asking the impossible from me. But if I remember that he miraculously multiplies all that I lack, not only for myself, but for others, then I can lay myself down at night knowing that no matter what comes, I will be provided for. This is the Daily Bread. The provision that cannot be manufactured, or planned for, or manipulated into happening. The enough-ness, the sometimes just-enough-ness, that gets you through one day, and then the next, and then the next.
Perhaps, instead of being given the amount of physical sleep that I want and my body needs, like Christ I am being strengthened to accept the Father’s will for these moments—to pray as he did on that sleepless night in Gethsemane, “not my will, but yours be done”—whatever needs the night brings. Perhaps I will be brought repeatedly to the end of my rope, only to discover I don’t have to hang on by my fingernails as I’ve always thought. Perhaps instead, God is already there, hanging on to me.
THIS IS PART ONE IN A SERIES ENTITLED REST FOR THE SLEEPLESS.
Join me next week for Part Two, where we will get brutally practical in ways you can receive rest from God, others, and even yourself, in the midst of an exhausting and sleep-deprived season. Subscribe below to get it directly in your inbox when it comes out.
Thank you for being here friends, and know that in my sleepless hours, I pray for rest for you.
Warmly,
Grace E. Kelley
Thank you Grace 🥺😢