In the sure and certain hope

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And if I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. (G.K. Chesterton, The Meaning of Dreams)

From an essay about the phrase "our daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer by Philip Lawton in the current Sabbath Recorder:

Humans are interesting creatures. We fight and beg and steal for control of our lives, but then every night we lay down that control. We trust that we will wake the next morning. But the truth is we have no control over whether that will happen. Every night when you go to bed you have faith that you will wake the next morning. When we are sleeping we are at our most vulnerable. And yet even the strongest control freak will go to bed each night. The irony of that is staggering.

What I realized this summer is that every day I wake is a blessing from God. There are a million things that could happen to me while I sleep and I have no control over any of them. I am quite literally putting my life in the hands of someone else. If the power goes out, I could die. If lightning strikes and shorts out my CPAP, I could die. If aliens come and abduct me in my sleep…. well maybe not that. But the point is that I have no control over what happens to me while I sleep. And that is exactly the way that God wants it. ....