Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

The night before last I didn’t sleep much, maybe three hours. The next morning I said “I only slept around three hours.” Our younger son asked, “Why?” I said, “I don’t know, maybe I was worrying about someone.” Then our older son said, “Maybe it was the Devil.”

Of course, we could chalk that up to a priest’s kid saying something humorous and awkward and I definitely laughed. I don’t generally think of the Devil prowling around with the goal of making me get a poor night’s sleep.

But maybe that is how the Devil works? Maybe evil starts with a bad night’s sleep and a cascade of poor choices that come from that. How often do we do thoughtless, cruel, or short-sighted things because we’re exhausted? I certainly have. There’s nothing like little or no sleep to set us up for a day of sniping, complaining, and general grumpiness. We fail to rest and so when we rise we fail to bring our best to the work of living and loving.

Ot feels like this may be how the Devil is working now. In insidious ways that seem so petty — distracting us from our deepest and truest self — from life in and with Christ. So we find ourselves exhausted, angry, and even despairing over the state of the world. It’s hard to find hope, joy, and a sense of peace when we’re just exhausted. I don’t know about you but I do find myself exhausted right now — whether it’s pandemic, politics, or protests. All of it just seems like a weight. So I worry and maybe it’s making me not sleep.

Maybe it’s not the Devil though. Maybe it’s angels waking us up and telling us to use the time we have to make a difference. Maybe it’s our better and deeper self waking us up as if to say, it’s time to work and pray so that the root of the exhaustion, the source of the protests, or the real cost of the pandemic can be faced on a human scale — on a scale we can imagine — one choice, relationship, moment, day, and possibility at a time.

Maybe we’re being awakened, from the exhaustion of being overwhelmed by the scale of it all, to be reminded that we are called to just do what we can, where we are, however we are able, for as long as we have strength. That strength can only come from rest and that rest comes not from worrying that what we have to offer isn’t enough but from knowing that God has given us all we have to offer — and it will be enough.

So whether it’s the Devil, or angels, or some deep psychological urge that’s waking us up, now that we’re up, what can we do with our time? What shall we do so that, when we go back to sleep, we do so with the knowledge that our day was a gift that we spent with joy, that we lived with courage, and that we ended with hope for the next.

Yours in Christ,

Robert