‘Blessings on him who first invented sleep!’ said Sancho Panza, the poor Spanish farm labourer and loyal squire to Don Quixote. ‘It is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot.’ Scripture, of course, emphasises that it is God who first created sleep. It is a generous gift from a generous God ‘who richly provides all things for us to enjoy’ (1 Timothy 6:17), and is absolutely essential to our health and well-being.
For this reason, we are compelled to sleep around eight hours out of every 24 (or four months out of every year, or 23 years out of every threescore years and ten). None of us can escape the stresses of life; they are written into the very fabric of our lives. But after the longest and most difficult of days, we can lie down and (usually) lose all our troubles in the God-given rest called sleep. During this time our body is dry-docked, and the process of restoration and renewal gets underway. When morning comes, we awake refreshed and reset for the new day.
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