Sunday Morning Meds--Now I Lay Me

In peace I will lie down and sleep,

    for you alone, Lord,

    make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4:8

At the heart of every story is conflict—a cat and a dog, a girl and a boy, an old man and his grief, a young woman and her insecurity. You can’t have a story without something, or someone, creating problems. There’s got to be an ouch.

For a book that I wrote long, long ago, a book of stories about people’s lives, I decided rather late in the game to interview an older couple I had once known, people I knew to be good and decent and kind, people I assumed, really, didn’t have huge conflicts. Honestly, I wanted to test the notion I’d come to believe, thirty-some interviews into this book, that everybody experiences sharp conflicts, everyone has a story.

It was a perfectly sunny day, I remember, and we sat on their front porch, my tape recorder spinning, catching a conversation that featured dozens of questions that unearthed nothing particularly memorable. The retired folks were everything I thought they would be—responsible, devout, easy-going, well-mannered. They weren’t necessarily saintly, but after two hours of names and places and darling family vacations, I felt myself in grave danger of having no story.

And then suddenly—and how exactly it happened I don’t remember—the old man looked at his wife cautiously, the kind of anxious glance I recognized immediately. “Are we going to tell him?” he asked her.

I had no idea what he was referring to, but with a certain strain of the eyes and those few words, I knew I was close to something memorable. We’d finally come to that particular something which kept them awake nights. Things happen in all of our lives that lead to sleepless nights.

David may have been the man closest to God’s own heart, but he had, nonetheless, myriad causes for sleeplessness. The prophet Nathan told him that evil will arise from his own household as a result of the Bathsheba affair and Uriah’s murder. Just picture rebel son Absalom hanging from his hair in a tree. Is it any wonder the King did some serious tossing and turning?

Psalm 4 is, among other things, a holy bromide for lousy sleepers, which includes most of us, really. Ironically, David’s horrifying anguish, his suffering, is our joy; because what’s here in the psalm is, if nothing else, a witness to something too many of us likely fight in silence—anxiety, lots of it. One in five of us suffers from some form of anxiety, so much so that it affects our behavior, according to a 2017 study reported in JAMA.

Psalm 4 starts with the command form, as so many psalms do: “Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress.” When you start a sentence with a verb, what follows is not supplication. David is not so much begging as demanding.

But by the end of the psalm, he’s loosened his fists: “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep” is the opening line of the first prayer many of us learn as a child, in an innocence no one will ever regain. The last line of Psalm 4 is almost a match, just as much a pledge life teaches to those of us who know at least something of deliverance.