Praying Through the Night

I have always marvelled at people who can pray all night long. Several years ago when I was studying linguistics in Dallas, I attended a Korean church for a class assignment. On their calendar of upcoming events was an all-night prayer service, starting at midnight on Friday. Seeing that made me feel like the worst Christian ever. I've never gone without sleep so that I could pray, and I often fall asleep in the middle of praying. So instructions like this one from Hippolytus in the 3rd century have always been guilt-inducing:

Pray before your body rests on the bed. Rise about midnight, wash your hands with water, and pray. If your wife is present also, pray both together. Do not be lazy about praying.                                                      

Sleepy Apostles

I'm not a night person. If I had gone into the garden with Jesus on his final night, I would have definitely fallen asleep too. Trying to keep Hippolytus' practice of midnight prayers would just make me feel miserable from sleep-deprivation and guilty for having a bad attitude about it. (We won't even discuss what would happen if I woke up my wife at midnight.)

But recently I was reminded of a magazine article that I read a while ago. It claimed that sleeping straight through the night for 7 to 8 hours is a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors didn't sleep like that. Before the invention of electric lighting it was very common to spend your nights like this: go to bed at sundown, sleep for a few hours, wake up and do stuff, and then go back to sleep until morning. Historians have found that people used to talk about "first sleep" and "second sleep" -- two distinct shifts of nightly slumber. It was normal for people to get up around midnight and do all sorts of things: talk to family and neighbors, snack, plan out tomorrow's activities, and ...  you got it -- pray. Some writers suggest that humans are more creative when they have these middle-of-the-night periods of wakefulness.

Many folks in the Bible dealt with God in the middle of the night. Bruce Malina and John Pilch are Bible scholars who have studied the book of Revelation. They claim that John's heavenly visions were inspired by constellations in the night sky. For example, the characters such as the living creatures, the elders, and the Beast and the Woman were specific groupings of stars that ancient Mediterranean folks would recognize. It makes sense that John would have experienced his revelation in the middle of the night, between his first and second sleeps. God might have used the constellations that John could actually see that night to speak those prophecies.

So, do you want to be more creative, enhance your prayer life, and hear from God? Go to bed earlier! In North America this time of year it gets dark around 5:30pm. That should give you plenty of time to get in two sleeps and some creative midnight moments before dawn.