When God is Awake
In the middle of David’s crisis, surrounded by voices that want him undone, the psalm turns on one quiet line:
“I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustains me.”
It’s the simplest sentence in the psalm, and the most profound. Because sleep is the full measure of trust. Sleep is what happens when a person stops pretending to fix their life.
Years ago, I came up with a simple definition of worry: Worry is pretending to do something.
It resonated with people because it names something we all do. We rehearse old betrayals. We replay conversations where we were misunderstood or attacked. We revisit mistakes, trying to rewrite them in imagination. We try to fix the past by thinking about it harder. We think on everything that might go wrong the next day or week. We try to manufacture our future.
It feels like activity. It feels responsible. It feels like vigilance. But it’s not. It’s motion without movement — the soul pacing in place.
Psalm 3 begins exactly there. David counts his enemies. He listens to their accusations. He feels surrounded. He does what we all do: he tries to manage fear by thinking about it. This is a man in the midst of trauma. He was betrayed by his son, displaced from his home, surrounded by enemies, and told he was abandoned by God.
But then something shifts. He stops rehearsing danger. He stops performing vigilance. He sleeps.
And I believe he sleeps because God is awake — and he knows it.
When my oldest daughter was small, she wandered into the kitchen one morning while I was having tea. She looked at me with that earnest curiosity she’s always had and asked, “Do grown-ups ever sleep?”
I laughed and said, “Of course we sleep. Why do you ask?”
She said, “Because… when I go to bed, you’re awake, and when I get up you’re awake. Once, in the middle of the night, I got up and you were awake.”
Our youngest daughter once wrote a piece about traveling in a car, snuggled in blankets, having been carried there at 4 a.m. She wrote about falling asleep comfortably because someone had their hands on the wheel.
Their wonder stayed with me. Children trust because someone is awake. Someone is watching. Someone is present. And somewhere along the way, adults can forget that Someone still is.
The argument against this trust can be the experience of tragedy, or, simply, the importance of planning. When we have experienced the world breaking, we stand at a precipice, looking into a chasm. When we are facing a large endeavor, shouldn’t we spend the time planning? Worry is pretending to do something. Planning is doing something. And when we recognize how badly things can go wrong, trust is not naïve; it digs deeper into the fullness of reality. It moves us to ask the questions on our hearts and to expect an answer.
Do You sleep?
Psalm 3 reminds me that faith is not a heroic stance or a mental achievement. Faith is relationship. Faith is rest because it is the quiet confidence that I don’t have to stay awake to protect myself. God is not asleep.
I don’t need to rehearse betrayals. I don’t need to rewrite the past. I don’t need to pretend my worry is making the future secure.
I can lay down. I can sleep. I can awaken to a world God has been holding all night.
And there’s where I find the invitation of Psalm 3. I’m invited to stop pretending, to stop pacing, to stop carrying what was never mine to carry.
I’ve invited to rest — because God is awake.
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