Posts Tagged: serving others

SERVING GOD, WITH SLEEP OR WITHOUT

On January 7, 2017 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

I did not sleep well last night.  I am reminded of two approaches to serving God.  One comes from the New Testament, the other from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim.

Paul, in defending his apostleship, boasts that he had served God “through many sleepless nights” (2 Corinthians 11:27).

I’m afraid that I don’t always use my sleeplessness to serve God or others.  Instead, I use sleeplessness to serve as an excuse for being a self-serving so and so!  (Truth hurts, but it also heals.)

But the question is, what will I do with my sleeplessness today?  Will I be pleasant to people, or will be a member of that huge clan called “the Whiner Family?”  Will I seek to glorify God, no matter how well or poorly I’ve slept?

Then, there is another story that goes in the opposite direction.  It is the story of Rabbi Shmelke, one of the early Hasidim, who lived in Nikolsburg (a town in what is now called Moravia, near Austria).  Rabbi Shmelke lived from 1726-1778.  One of the wonderful stories about him involves sleep.

“Rabbi Shmelke did not want to interrupt his studies for too long a time, and so he always slept sitting up, his head resting on his arm.  In his fingers he held a lit candle which roused him when it guttered and the flame touched his hand.  When Rabbi Elimelekh visited him, and recognized the power of the holiness which was still locked within him, he prepared a couch for him and with great difficulty persuaded him to lie down for a little while.  The he closed and shuttered the windows.  Rabbi Shmelke slept until broad daylight.  It did not take him long to notice this, but he was not sorry he had slept, for he was filled with a hitherto unknown sunny clearness.  He went to the House of Prayer and prayed before the congregation as usual.  But to the congregation it seemed that they had never heard him before.  They were entranced and uplifted by the manifest power of his holiness.  When he recited the verses about the Red Sea, they gathered up the hems of their kaftans for fear the waves towering to the left and right might wet them with salty foam.  Later Shmelke said to Elimelekh: ‘Not until this day did I know that one can serve God with sleep’” (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, volume 1, pp. 187-188).

So, according to Paul, God can be served and glorified in, and presumably by, sleeplessness.  According to Rabbi Shmelke, God can be served in, and presumably by sleep.  Who is right?

I am rather fond of the saying, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  The truth is this: Everything, when submitted to God, can glorify God.  God can and will use everything to bless us.  We can also use everything to serve God and others.

The only question is this: Will we choose to do so?

No, on second thought, that is not the question.  The question is this: Will I choose to do so?

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