More From Bruce Bedingfield

I was honored to have my devotion “In the Night” published in The Upper Room on July 10, 2023. It describes a method of dealing with sleep problems that God led me to when I asked for help.

As I expressed there, “I was going through a difficult time.” Yet so was everyone else in the world, for it was mid-March 2020—the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I reached a point where I felt completely overwhelmed, got down on my knees, and put my own experience with that terrifying mystery in God’s hands.

Almost immediately, I felt a new confidence and peace. I sensed emerging wisdom on ways to help others as well. I felt inspired to check on certain neighbors. As a physician—a pediatrician—I felt some expertise and justification to write to my church’s congregation, my local newspaper, and certainly my own patients’ families with advice on how to approach it all.

But my mental stress was accentuated by my difficulties sleeping at night. Actually, I have never had problems falling asleep, but I would awaken too early, then struggle to fall back asleep. Worries would intrude and interfere. Here, too, I felt helpless and chose to put this situation into God’s hands as well.

And here, too, God quickly came to my aid. If I awoke and realized I wouldn’t easily return to sleep, I would get up and write my worries down. By God’s grace, I would often gain a new insight on the problems—an insight that hadn’t occurred to me in my waking hours. Just writing the concerns down and briefly praying about each one proved to be highly beneficial. Then I would return to bed, leaving them in God’s care.

I am at an age when I find I benefit from an early afternoon nap each day. (They can also be a helpful antidote for fatigue from those sleep problems!) I soon referred to my night times with God as a “reverse nap”—awake for ten or twenty minutes rather than asleep. I found it helpful not to look at the clock, but to “assume that it’s 2 a.m.”

I’m fortunate to have some knowledge about proper sleep as a physician. Yet I’m all the more blessed to have God’s wisdom through scripture. God blesses me with wisdom when I awaken! In my devotion I included Psalm 16:7, “I bless the Lord, who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me” (NRSVUE). In those early morning hours, in fact, I can agree with  Isaiah—“Morning by morning he wakens, wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught” (Is. 50:4). Yet God taught me many years ago that sleep itself is a gift from God through Psalm 127:2, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved.” And the longer scripture passage from my devotion ends, “I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety” (Ps. 4:8). Finally, the featured scripture passage from my devotion speaks to us all in anxious moments—day or night—“Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you” (Ps. 116:7).