Moving Mountains, Losing Sleep, and God in Nature

Photo by Trevor Brown on Unsplash

I am jet-lagged, but content. After an almost-five hour flight involving too much ginger ale and not enough water, I’m back where I grew up, in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by trees and cars and mountains.

There is something spiritually healthy about sleep-deprivation, I think. Biologically, our inhibitions are lowered and it’s harder for us to make thoughtful, conscious decisions — similar to the effects of drinking alcohol. In fact, one study showed that after 17 to 19 hours without sleep, participants’ [response speeds and accuracy] performance was equivalent or worse than that of a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of 0.05 percent.¹

Sleep deprivation is a natural occurrence that strips away our competence and our ability to control our emotions (among many other things). It reminds me that I can only do so much, that my body is a physical, spiritual thing with many needs and so few resources to meet them. It reminds me, that although created in His image, I am not Him. I must sleep. I must eat.

My brain can’t hold me up for too long. I’ve spent the last couple weeks running around and pushing myself to maximize my time — to be productive, to have fun, to be present in relationships, to learn — and through all of that, have been sensing I have been long overdue for a soul diagnosis. As I sometimes avoid the doctor and dentist, I’ve been ignoring God’s much needed heart surgery.

So I am thankful for sleep deprivation because it has stripped me of my ability to run away on my own. I’m too tired for that. Now, all I have is everything I have been running from. And here I am, barely functioning, eyes half closed, but heart spilling over, weeping and praising the Lord for all the mountains He has moved in my life.

I’ve seen you move, you move the mountains.
And I believe, I’ll see you do it again.

It’s much easier to remind myself of this when there are literal mountains in sight (something we don’t get in most parts of Michigan). That lyric from Do It Again gets me every time. Mountains seem pretty heavy, after all. But He is strong. He is mighty. And He made the mountains. Why are we surprised when He moves them?

As we were driving through the city last night, I felt the familiar senses of comfort and foreboding all at once — the darkened trees, the shrouded street lights, the shimmering water, the mountains and the Sound looming in the background. Smelling the air, drinking it all in with my eyes, I’m reminded of God’s mystery.

Sometimes, I think I have God figured out because reading the Bible feels familiar, because everyone at church knows my name, and because I’m not going through any particularly identifiable challenge. Classic human being, right?

But here, now, I’m reminded that I will never figure Him out completely — He is in His creation, towering over us all, holding us all up, sometimes stabilizing things, sometimes winking from the horizon, sometimes a shadow, sometimes a softened light glowing through the vellum of an overcast sky. And I am glad I haven’t had a full night’s rest in awhile. Sometimes we see things better with our eyes half open.


¹A M Williamson, Anne-Marie Feyer. Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/pdf/v057p00649.pdf