Quieting My Soul

An incomplete list of the sleep aids you might find on my bedside table at any given moment:

• Melatonin gummies

• a tea cup

• lavender linen spray

• NyQuil

• a white-noise machine

• an air-filtration machine

• a glass of water

• headphones to play dull podcasts

• Kindle to read dull books

And still, more and more often in the past few years, nights find me staring at the ceiling trying to say the alphabet backwards, hoping that will finally do the trick.

Maybe you’ve felt it too. I know I’m not alone—last year a friend gave me a memoir about insomnia, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Around the same time, a book called Why We Can’t Sleep declared insomnia and anxiety part of the new “women’s mid-life crisis.” 

Sometimes I think back to those days of early motherhood when I was so exhausted that nothing could keep me awake. I remember the soft cheeks of my babies, their milk-drunk faces, their bodies heavy in my arms. And I wish I could be a milk-drunk baby, so peaceful. I wish someone would sing me a lullaby.

One of my favorite psalms is a lullaby of a sort. In Psalm 131, the psalmist describes rest that can be found when you have cultivated a deep, mature, lifelong trust in God. The image the psalm gives for rest isn’t one of a milk-drunk baby, quiet on her mother’s breast, though—it’s actually exactly the opposite. “I have calmed and quieted my soul . . . . Like a weaned child is my soul within me,” the psalmist says.

The psalmist’s soul is not like a child at her mother’s breast. It’s like a child who no longer clamors for her mother’s breast, who has learned to trust and wait.

Any mother can tell you that weaning is a process. When my daughter was a newborn, it didn’t matter who was holding her, or if she was hungry or not; if anyone cradled her, she immediately started rooting around, looking for milk. If she was having a hard time falling asleep, a few minutes nursing would calm her right down.

As she got older, it was much harder to teach her to self-soothe, to quiet herself, to trust that she could fall asleep without me and still, if she woke and needed me, I’d be there.

Even after she learned that, for several years my daughter kept comfort close at hand by means of pacifiers. And yes, that plural is there on purpose. In pictures, you can see a two-year-old toddling around with two pacifiers in her mouth at the same time, and a third clutched in chubby fingers.

She didn’t give them up until we told her she could get a bike—at which point, she grabbed them all and dramatically threw them in the trash can.

“I have calmed and quieted my soul . . . . Like a weaned child is my soul within me,” the psalmist says.

Sometimes I wonder what cheap, plastic comfort items my soul is hanging on to instead of learning to ride a bike. I mean instead of learning to trust in God.

The psalmist’s soul isn’t weaned from God—rather, in the psalm, the soul is weaned from needing God’s provision and presence to be a certain way, to be available on demand.

The calmed and quieted soul here is a soul who has seen darkness. Who has known disappointment or even tragedy and has cried out to God asking why. Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the innocent suffer? Why am I awake again at two o’clock in the morning?

But the psalmist has come through darkness and learned to say: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.”

The psalmist has learned to stop rooting around for answers on demand and has learned instead to rest in a deep sense of trust in God.

I want to be clear. There are a lot of postures we can take before God. It is not always time to quiet your soul before God—sometimes it’s time to protest, to lament, to question, to argue, to rail. Sometimes it is time to praise, to thank, to call others to praise and thanksgiving. And there are a lot of good gifts God has given us to help with anxiety and sleeplessness, including medication and counseling and chamomile and gummy bears.

But sometimes it is right to quiet your soul. To rest, to trust. To give up clamoring. To believe there will be enough. To learn to live without moment-by-moment assurance, because you know, from long experience, God’s goodness and provision. Because you know your salvation has already been accomplished. 

And that even if God answered all your questions right now, you still wouldn’t really understand—those answers wouldn’t satisfy the way the presence of God satisfies.

I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Or, I want it to be.

God, please make it so.

—Written by Amy Peterson. Used by permission from the author.