Night
I have an interesting relationship to the night. I’m not a night owl, by anyone’s reckoning. I don’t like leaving my house after 6 PM and I like to be in bed by ten, 9:30 if I can make it happen. Even when I was in college, I would get so tired hanging out with my friends at ten or eleven o’clock that I’d often doze off or just sleep over because it was so late. My job requires me to stay out until ten or eleven sometimes and I’m just dragging by the time I get home. I used to tell people that nothing good would happen after 10 PM. I’d like to amend that now: nothing good, except sleeping, happens after 10PM.
I’m a morning person. For most of the year, I get up before the sun. She beats me in the summer months, rising as she will at 5:30 AM, but I’m not far behind because I hate the heat and have to get my run in before she’s well over the horizon or I’ll get a migraine from simply being too hot. I love hearing the birds sing before cars start zooming down the road and trains start banging on the tracks. I love the coolness of morning before the dew evaporates. Not very many people are up quite so early or, rather, they aren’t out and I relish the quiet as if the whole world were mine alone.
Now, you might be forgiven for assuming that because I love the sunrise and am not a night owl that summer is my favorite season. It’s not. I hate the heat, not just for running, but for literally everything else, too. Why would we like sweating for no reason at all? I feel like I have to shower just because I went outside, not because I exerted myself or got dirty. And don’t try to tell me it’s because I live in a humid place. Don’t start with the “dry heat” desert thing. No. I’ve been to the desert and I’d like to ask you a question: Do you know what else is a dry heat? My oven. My oven where I BAKE my food. That’s a dry heat. Would you like to live in there? Me neither. I hate the heat.
I also don’t like that the sun stays up so late in the summertime. My daughter won’t go to sleep until way past her bedtime because the sun is still up. My husband had to engineer some crazy blackout curtain system to get her to rest. I get confused when the sun stays up in the summer because I just want to go to bed and everyone else wants to party. I can’t stand it. Isn’t our society fast enough? Why do we have to make it worse by starting events at 8PM?
I’m verging on a digression here, so I’ll stop. You get it. I don’t like summer. My favorite season is autumn because, after all, I am a basic white girl. Though, autumn is closely followed by winter because I love cold weather. I love bundling up in my snuggliest clothes and sleeping under a mountain of blankets. I love campfires and fuzzy socks and sweatpants and soup. I love the time of year where it’s cooler because there is less light.
Did you catch that? I like the six months out of the year where there’s more dark than light. If there’s more light than dark, I’m less enthused.
It would be fair for you to ask me why, at this point. I love the sunrise and the early morning and hate leaving my house at night time. Why do I breathe more deeply in the darkest months?
In the western, twenty-first century world, the day begins with the sunrise. Well, sort of. I think it still does in the general cultural zeitgeist, but scientists and misanthropes make the new day technically start at midnight, which is neither day nor night and an odd way of doing things. Most people in the western, twenty-first century world, whatever the detailed time-keepers say, think of the day starting when they get up. Most of us get up in the morning and, so, our day starts then. And this makes a lot of sense- we arise from unconsciousness to begin to actually live and move and breathe and do things with ourselves. So, the day starts in the morning.
Unless you’re Jewish.
If you read the first bit of the Bible, you’ll notice a poetic retelling of the creation of all that is. God is the main character (as he is throughout the Biblical narrative) and he’s going about his work of making platypuses, venus fly traps, the Andromeda galaxy, and humanity in the course of his typical work week. Pretty good, huh? If you look closely, you’ll notice something odd to our twenty-first century, western understanding of days. At the end of each little chunk of creation, this refrain, or an appropriate variation of it, repeats, “There was an evening, and there was a morning: one day”.
Do you see it?
According to the Biblical account of CREATION the day begins with an evening, not a morning. And so, Jewish people, this being their family history after all, have always understood the day beginning at sundown, when they would go to their rest.
They began the day by essentially doing nothing: laying down and going to sleep. They would rest during the night time and then they would get up in the morning and go about their tasks. They went about the rest of their day after they’d had a rest.
(Side note: a lot of my ideas here come from two places. The BEMA podcast introduced me to the ideas about the day beginning with night. And, as is usually the case, John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry put words to the ideas swimming around in my head about rest, sabbath, and our culture. I’m sure there are others who influenced my ideas, but you’ll see these two reflected pretty heavily here.)
Now, there’s some pretty important implications here that I hope you’re picking up on. First, if the day begins with rest, then you don’t have to earn it. You get rest as a starting point from which to live the rest of your life. Second, if you don’t have to earn rest, then your value and position must be determined by something other than what you do. If rest is a given, then you must have some sort of inherent value. I know this is true because every system that human beings have ever come up with for government or education or parenting or anything else is merit-based. You have to earn your place, your privilege, your whatever. At best, you start at zero and work your way up. I know some people, personally, who have told me that other folks start in the negative with them. I’m sure you can think of a system or two where people, or maybe you yourself, started in the negative (here’s looking at you, USA). It’s harder for some and easier for others, but the point is the same: everyone has to work to earn their place. And in a system like that, who would begin their work by resting? In fact, most people view having to rest as an inconvenience rather than a gift or something inherent in the design of the world.
Other folks just don’t have a concept for what rest really is. This was true of the original audience of the first bit of the Bible. The ancient Jewish people, being very ancient and in step with the times, were illiterate (they couldn’t read or write, as a rule). So, they kept their history straight the old fashioned way: oral tradition. Moses, or some of his co-workers and contemporaries, was the first person to write down these traditions in what we now have as the first five books of the Bible. They wrote them down according to God’s direction and design and the first thing he said was, “I’m God. I made it all. Everything. You. Your mother. Your donkey. All that you see. I made it. I’m the one. And after I finished making it, I rested. The work is finished, the labor is done. Begin your days, your weeks, your months, your lives as I do: with rest”. And this was seriously revolutionary for the original audience because just a few weeks before they heard this story told to them in an orderly, national history platform, they were slaves. In Egypt. For four hundred years. As in all they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents or maybe even further back had done was work from sun up to sun down day in and day out for seven days a week and thirty or so days a month and three hundred and sixty five-ish days a year four hundred times. Slaves don’t get a day off. They are property, little more than animals or machines. They don’t get rest.
And yet.
God said, “You’re not an animal. You’re not a machine. You’re a human being. I made you. You’re mine. The day starts with rest.” Not because they’d earned it. Not because they were more special than anyone else. But because God wrote it into the code of creation: the day begins with rest.
And he would tell them this over and over again through a variety of people and circumstances for years and years that added up into centuries and, possibly, millenia (I have not done the math and I’m not going to- it’s tangential to my point). God was telling the ancient Jewish people that they were no longer slaves in Egypt and he’s telling us that we’re not slaves to the creation of our own identity or way in life.
The day begins with rest because it’s critical that we understand that our value isn’t in what we do or achieve, it’s inherent to who we are as people created by God.
And this is why I like the night. When the year slows down and is more dark than light, I’m reminded that I don’t have to earn a break. I just get it, free of charge, right out of the gate. Our culture of “advancement” has tried to rob us of our awareness of this reality with the electric lightbulb, daylight savings time, and clocks. They can’t rob me. I’ll burn it all to the ground if I have to. God says I get to rest, so I’ll take the autumn and winter as my reminder and turn off all the lights in my house, thank you very much.
Don’t you want to? Just a little bit?
Don’t you want to give in and slow down and embrace the night?
There’s this great phrase I’ve heard tossed around on the internet and in self-help circles recently: “You can’t pour from an empty cup”. It’s a riff on the original from Eleanor Brown, “You cannot pour from an empty vessel”. I love this. It’s not Biblical, but it’s getting at the heart of a really important Biblical truth: you weren’t made to be the source. You weren’t made to fill your own cup or, honestly, that of others. If you try to meet the needs of others, serve them, love them (all good things, by the way) all on your own, you’ll shrivel up and die like a worm on the sidewalk in summertime. You weren’t made to be the source. You were made for something else to “fill your cup”. If you don’t believe me, I’d encourage you to take a look at your own life and do some honest evaluation of what’s empowering you and where you’re getting your energy from. Everyone is filling their cup with something.
And this is why rest is so important for human beings. We often try to fill our cups with “self-care” or relationships or exercise or food or achievements or adventures or experiences. Now, I don’t hate these things. I think that they’re all really wonderful. But they won’t give you rest. They won’t fill your cup. They’re not the source any more than you are.
You see, the problem with our love of the summer time and trying to squeeze absolutely every second out of every day is that we won’t accept our limitations. We don’t want to be dependent on anyone or anything for our life, meaning, or anything else. So, we come up with abominations (here’s my bias coming out) like daylight “savings” time, a twenty-four hour news cycle, and the internet. We won’t let ourselves rest. We won’t embrace the night. From our infancy we’ve been running away from the dark and hiding from our limitations so that we don’t have to be in a relationship with the God who made us.
Jesus alone, of all the world teachers, invites his followers to come and rest. Not come and work and change the world. Not come and see if you can be good enough. Not come and conform to these rules so that you can be “in”. Come and rest. You’re already worthy. You’re already enough. The work is already finished. Won’t you step into the life you were created for? Won’t you work with your limitations instead of against them? Don’t you, just a little, know that this is true?
Want to know something else about the night? We don’t get the sunrise, if it’s not dark first. The sun literally cannot rise if it’s already up. If we lived in perpetual daylight, we wouldn’t get the sunrise or the sunset, for that matter. What beauty, wonder, and magic we’d miss! At least we have not figured out a way to eliminate the night, just chase it away and kind of ignore it (as we do with all of our problems and uncomfortable realities in our culture of comfort). But the moon and the sun will not be thwarted: they’ll rise and fall as they were created to do and remind us to do the same.