SLEEPLESS IN SEPTEMBER
By Steve Bietz
Burke County
September is considered to be one of the most stressful months of the year. With summer coming to an end and summer vacations in the rearview mirror and adding to this the back-to-school pressures, well, it’s daunting. We are told that September brings a whole lot of sleeplessness. With less sleep comes a long list of issues. One item on the list is our reaction time. Health specialists tell us that sleep is paramount to our reaction time. Less sleep means that we are more prone to injury because we react more slowly. We are told that teens in grades 7 – 12 when they sleep less than 8 hours a day, double their risk of injury because of reaction time.
Have you thought about God’s reaction time? Certainly, the psalmist David gave it some thought. Again and again, we see David wondering why God was taking so long and not reacting faster to his problems. Is God sleeping? For example: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?” (Psalm 13:1) I recall Elijah, In 1 Kings 18, taunting the priests of Baal on Mt Carmel with claiming that they should yell louder to their god Baal because he may have been sleeping. We do not need to yell out our prayers so that we can wake up our God.
I am thankful for what the psalmist includes for us in Psalm 121:3 – 4. “He who watches over you will not slumber, indeed, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
You and I may struggle to sleep in September and find ourselves nodding off from time to time…hopefully not while we are driving. But we have a Watchman who never dozes off. God is always on duty watching over us. His presence is constant. His protection is 24/7 for you and me. He is alert day and night and not even for one moment does He get sleepy. God is sleepless, yet this thought is not to cause us concern. Instead, we are to rejoice that our God never slumbers on duty and never sleeps, not even in September.
____________________________________________
Steve Bietz is the pastor at Morganton Seventh Day Adventist Church. You can read more good Christian news from Pastor Steve Bietz HERE.
____________________________________________
Blue Ridge Christian News covers Burke County, McDowell County, Mitchell County, Yancey County, Madison County, in North Carolina, and Christian news from around the country.
