Last night, I couldn’t sleep. It was not fun.

I went to bed somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 pm and thought I would be good to go. An hour later, I knew I was in trouble. Every half hour later found me still wide awake and increasingly agitated with myself for not being able to sleep. I was also annoyed with my cat for being able to fall asleep the moment she laid down on the pillow (I’m sure she was equally annoyed with me for tossing and turning so much and waking her up). For the record, agitation doesn’t help you sleep. And no, warm milk did not help.

I have found the harder you try to sleep, the less likely it is that you will succeed. The old motto of “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” doesn’t work with insomnia. It only makes it worse.

This may or may not make sense to you, but I may or may not have fallen asleep somewhere between 2:30 and 7 am. I can’t really be sure that I wasn’t deep in thought or really sleeping. When I woke up in the morning, I didn’t feel like I had slept at all.

The good part is that I got in a lot of praying. Mostly along the lines of, “Lord, help me fall asleep,” but nevertheless, I had plenty of time to pray and meditate. The bad part is that I had plenty of time to think, too much time.

Hopefully, I will sleep better tonight. I have felt like a zombie all day and my mental capacity has been at the level of “fire bad, tree pretty.” It hasn’t been pretty.

Maybe I will experience the ultimate irony and dream about being awake all night with insomnia. Heck, I’ve dreamed stranger dreams than that by far.

I’m remembering the verse in the Psalms (I think) which says that God grants sleep to those he loves. That’s a beautiful promise. I pray tonight that both you and I realize that promise and that we wake up refreshed and ready for a new day full of possibilities and adventures and whatever God has in store for us.