I don’t get enough sleep and neither does Gorgeous.

And if I’m going to be willing to face my O-R then we gotta admit it is a problem entirely of our own making.

We all know there are significant health advantages that go along with getting enough sleep. Google the phrase health advantages of sufficient sleep and you’ll get over 5.4 million sites chock full of those very benefits.

Here are Some Examples

• Clearer thinking
• Improve Tolerance to Hot Weather
• Improved Learning Ability
• Better Memory
• Reduce Blood Pressure
• Lower Risk of Heart Disease
• Helps prevent Diabetes
• Fights Depression

Yet in spite of these known benefits most of us still don’t get enough sleep. There’s just too much to do and not enough hours in the day, right?

That’s what most of us think. And most of us would keep going without any break if we could. I know I struggle with feeling like sleep is a waste of time. Why is the system set up so that we need to sleep in the first place?

I really don’t know. But I suspect that if the system wasn’t set up to force us to sleep sometime most of us would simply self destruct.

Did you know that God set up the whole system so that we’d get enough rest in the first place? The Bible says

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.

But what if you don’t buy into the whole God thing?

It turns out it doesn’t matter where sleep is concerned. You are going to sleep eventually.

And you might even find that God slows you down before you self destruct. He has a track record of doing that.

Back in Ancient times God devastated the nation of Israel and had most of them carried off into captivity in part to give the land itself a rest. He had told them to give their fields an off year once every seven years and not to plant crops for a whole year. They never actually followed the by-year instruction. So this is what the Bible says about the time they were in captivity

The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.

God goes through some gyrations to give the land a rest and he does the same thing for us. Gorgeous is struggling with a cold right now. She spent yesterday resting on the couch. And I think it drove her a little bit nuts.

But the alternative of self-destructing would be far worse.

I don’t want what she’s got. But if I don’t start sleeping a little more God may just decide to slow me down and force me to get a little rest anyway.
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