Prepare Him Room: Before Silent Night (Luke 8:22-25)

Do you ever have those moments where the world actually feels like Silent Night – all is calm and all is bright? What do we do with the nights that don’t feel quite so peaceful? The ones where it’s 9:00 p.m. and you’re still working because you have a deadline. Or when it’s 2:00 a.m. and your child wakes you up for the third time.  Exercise, study, practicing a new skill–they all require sleep for our body to recover or our brain to integrate new knowledge before those activities provide any benefit to our bodies.  So all the time you spend on those things? Pointless if you don’t sleep.   In Luke 8, the disciples are caught up in a storm. To their dismay, Jesus is sleeping. But at their cry, Jesus wakes up, rebukes the storm, and it stops. Jesus then looks at his disciples and says, “Don’t you trust me?” When we choose to stop what we’re doing and sleep, we are essentially making the statement, “God, I trust you.” We are allowing our bodies to function in the way our Creator made them to, following the rhythms of morning and evening that we see from the creation story. We are physically acknowledging we do not run the universe and that we can sleep in peace because we trust the God who does, the one who will not let us stumble, who never sleeps. That’s worship. It’s a declarative act of our trust in God over and above our trust in our own ability to make things happen or to run our own little worlds. It’s a declaration that God is God, and we are not.