She Can Sleep Anywhere and Rest Nowhere

She can be asleep in ninety seconds. She has done it in a chair with the lights on, in the passenger seat of a car with the radio going, once at a wedding on a bench in a hallway for eleven minutes while a band played.

People say it as a compliment. You are so lucky. You can sleep anywhere.

She is forty-four. And what she worked out this year, and has said out loud to exactly one person, is that she has not rested since she was in her twenties. Not once, not for an hour. She sleeps constantly and she wakes tired and she has told doctors about the tiredness and they have run the tests and the tests are fine.

Because sleep and rest are not the same thing and nobody says so. A body that has learned to switch off fast has learned an off switch, and an off switch is not rest. Rest is a thing that happens while a person is awake, when the guarding stops, and she has no idea when she last did that or whether she ever has.

Some people learned young to be able to sleep in any room, on any surface, at short notice. I am going to leave that description alone rather than turn it into an explanation, and I am not going to hand anybody a story about her family, because I do not know them and neither does anybody reading this. That is not what this is for.

What I will say is that a skill is not a symptom, and that this woman's ability is real and has served her, and that it has also been standing in for something else for about twenty years.

Where the strength comes from at the end of that chapter

Let me put a line down, and I want the sentence before it as well, because the pair of them is the point.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.Habakkuk 3:17-19

Everything in that list is a food supply. Habakkuk is describing total agricultural failure, which in his world means starvation, and then he says the strength is the Lord's.

And then the image: feet like a deer's, walking on high places. A deer on a mountain is not braced. That is the whole reason the picture works. A deer moves over ground that would make a person crouch, and it does it lightly, because its feet are made for the ground it is on.

You are given feet for the ground you are on, and the strength in that verse was never something you were expected to generate. That is not a nice thought handed to a tired woman. It is what is written in Habakkuk 3, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and sets it into a body in a garden chair. Sleeping is a skill. Rest is given.

And notice that Habakkuk does not say the fig tree recovers. The chapter ends without one circumstance improving. What changes is where the strength is located, and that is the only thing that changes.

You have a strength that is the Lord's rather than yours, and twenty years of running on your own has not been the arrangement He was offering. Habakkuk 3:19 is the line it rests on, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old prophet land in a back yard in the late afternoon.

What rest actually is

Now let me be precise about the thing, because the imprecision is what has kept it out of reach.

Sleep is unconsciousness. Rest is the guarding stopping. They can happen at the same time and in her case they have not, which is why the tests come back fine and she is still tired.

And here is what makes it hard: rest is not something a person can perform. Nobody can decide to stop guarding, in the same way nobody can decide to stop listening for a sound. What a person can do is put themselves somewhere the guarding is not needed, repeatedly, and let a body work out over months that it is not needed there.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

Give, in that sentence. It is not an instruction to achieve rest. It is somebody handing it over, and the only thing asked for is coming.

You were offered rest as a gift rather than as an achievement, and there is no version of the verse where you have to produce it. Matthew 11:28 is the text this sits on, and it is His Spirit who lets a capable woman receive something she cannot manufacture.

You are held right now, in this chair, whether or not your guard has come down yet. It is written that the Lord God is my strength and He makes my feet like the deer, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a body that has been on duty since its twenties.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and go back to a doctor and use the word rest rather than the word sleep, because they are different complaints and the second one gets tested and the first one gets missed. Being strengthened by God has never been a reason to go without a real person in the room.