With Mary Ewa
If God did not create sleep for man, the soul would have been so weary.
For sleep, in its silent kindness, is God’s way of reminding man that even the strongest need to shut down. Burdens grow heavier in the dead of night, especially when sleep eludes and time stretches endlessly — when thoughts are stripped bare and truth walks unashamed.
It is in those quiet, restless hours that lies find rest and truth awakens. When the body lies still, the mind begins its long pilgrimage through memories, regrets, and silent prayers. I lie here, flipping through the worn pages of my life, wondering how much harder existence would be if sleep wasn’t a sacred part of man’s night — when darkness itself commands a shutdown and tiredness calls for surrender.
Yet today, many have lost that gift. Many are crushed under the invisible weight of their burdens — burdens heavy enough to break even the strongest human spirit. All because of certain actions taken, or actions we failed to take.
Life remains an irony. One would think that the successful, surrounded by abundance, would be the ones to rest easy. But the truth is often the opposite. It is not always the successful who find sleep — sometimes, it is sleep that finds its way more freely into the eyes of those who have little.
The wealthy lie awake, minds entangled in the fear of losing what they’ve built, paranoid about those who wish to take it. Their thoughts race faster than time. Meanwhile, the not-so-successful — the ones with little or nothing to their name — sleep soundly, snoring their nights away in borrowed dreams. In that dreamland, they have enough to eat and drink; they live large in the soft corners of their subconscious, tasting a life they may never hold awake.
What a mystery — that peace often dwells with those who have nothing to protect.
Worries grow loudest at night. They echo through the walls of the mind when everything else is silent. The heart beats differently in those moments, enslaved by the noise within. Thoughts, like restless birds, refuse to perch.
And yet, maybe that’s why God made sleep. Not just as rest for the body, but as release for the soul. A pause button for the chaos of being human. Without it, man would drown in the flood of his own thoughts.
So tonight, as I lay here between wakefulness and surrender, I’m reminded that sleep is not weakness — it is grace.
And when it escapes you, may your restless thoughts at least find meaning, may your truth walk freely, and may your heart — though tired — still find peace in the knowing that even in sleeplessness, the soul is refined and restored…
