Fighting Sleep

I have a two year old daughter, and like most kids her age she takes naps. But the interesting thing is that she doesn’t want to take naps anymore, she wants to be a big kid. So when it comes to be naptime she tries to fight it, doing anything she can to occupy her brain so that she doesn’t fall asleep. She of course needs that nap, and she is cranky because she hasn’t gotten it. She fights and fights and fights against the thing she needs the most.

What I find most interesting about this is that as an adult, I would love to have a designated part of my daily schedule assigned to napping. I always thought that they should give kids naptime in High School rather than kindergarten, which is when they really want it anyway. We grow up wanting to get out of nap time, and then when they take it away we would kill for a naptime.

On the other hand, I think we do the exact same thing my daughter does at nap time when it comes to our relationship with God. We sin, and as a result we distance ourselves from God. We feel guilty over our sin, and so we push Him away. We avoid Him because we don’t want to face Him. And often, when we do this, we find ways to continue in our sin, making the same wrong choices over and over and digging ourselves a deeper and deeper hole. But we still don’t turn back to God, not until we’ve hit an all-time low. And when we do, often we find that He has been waiting for us, not loving us any less in spite of all we have done. We fight and fight and fight against what we need the most, a restored relationship with the God who loved us enough to send Christ to forgive us of all our sin.