When you’re tired everything seems heavier. And harder. And more painful. If you haven’t slept, your ability to make decisions is impaired. Your ability to manage your emotions is destroyed. You cry more. You hurt more. You say stupid things.  

Things always seem clearer in the morning. It’s like the fog lifts, the skies are bluer and your body and brain work better. You just feel so much better after a good sleep. Whenever I had a decision to make or a difficult situation to digest, my mother used to always say “sleep on it”.   

Last week in the prayer room, one line of a poem by Ana Lisa de Jong caught my attention: 

….Because the sleep that restores us, 

in some small way reflects the resurrection…. 

The resurrection is the crux of Christianity. It is the main point of our faith. But how do you explain it? “Jesus died and rose again” seems a bit flat if I’m honest. To someone facing the uncertainty of not knowing how they’ll pay their bills, to someone grieving the loss of a loved one, to the heartbroken, to the sick, does it really matter that Jesus rose again 2,000 years ago?  

It’s not simply to prove that He can do miracles like coming back to life. Sure He did that one with Lazarus and the little girl. With Jesus, it’s about restoration; He is making things new (as in, no longer broken). All that is unjust, painful, tired and tear-stained went to the grave with Jesus. All our sin and shame – He shared it in his own life and death, and He shares it now. And by rising again, He is not just bearing the sorrows of humankind, but restoring those broken parts back to life.  

In his resurrection He pulls us up out of the fogs we find ourselves in; the fog of trying to be moral, the fog of indecision, the fog of anxious thoughts, the fog of grief.  

When we have slept well, our human fogs are less intense. We feel restored.  

This is what I think the resurrection is like. 

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