My father once told me he did not understand why people were so afraid of death, because we spend our whole lives practicing for it.
Every night, he said, we go to sleep and do not know how.
Every morning, we wake again and do not know how.
He called these little “practice runs,” and when he said it, I laughed in surprise—then sat stunned by how true it was.
Each night we let go.
We surrender awareness, time, control, and consciousness. We do not know where we are in our sleep, nor how long the dark has held us.
And yet we are not terrified of this surrender, because life has taught us to trust the morning.
We wake, and the sun is shining, and it is a new day.
I have never gone to bed or risen again without thinking of that since.
Sometime later, I discovered the ancient Jewish prayer Elohai Neshama:
My God, the soul You have given me is pure…
You preserve it within me…
and one day You will take it from me and restore it to me…
I remember reading it and thinking:
They knew.
They knew this mystery all along.
They knew that each morning is not merely the continuation of life, but its return. That breath is given back. That the soul is entrusted to God through the night and restored again with mercy.
Sleep, then, is not only rest.
It is a daily rehearsal of surrender.
And waking is a small resurrection.
Perhaps this is one of God’s gentlest kindnesses: that He builds into every day a rhythm of letting go and being returned, so that we may learn, slowly and without terror, that we are more held than we know.
My father saw this with the wisdom of simple wonder. The prayer confirms it with ancient reverence.
And between the two, I have come to believe that bedtime and morning are never ordinary things.
They are little thresholds.
Little crossings.
Little acts of trust.
We lie down not knowing how we will be kept.
We rise not knowing how we were carried.
And yet the soul is returned, the breath is restored, and the light is waiting.
And perhaps this is one small part of what it means when Scripture says, “His mercies are new every morning.”
We do not simply wake to another day. We wake to returned breath, restored soul, and mercy waiting in the light.
When we awaken and are breathing, we are already living in mercy given.
My husband often answers the question How are you? the same way:
“Great! I woke up and I’m vertical and breathing. God is good!”
Simple as it is, I think he is naming the same truth.
To wake and breathe is already to be met by mercy.
Before we have achieved anything, solved anything, or understood anything, we are already living in gift.
More and more, I have begun to imagine night this way:
God singing us gently to sleep.
Holding what we cannot hold.
Keeping watch while we disappear into mystery.
And then morning as His whisper over the soul, calling us again by name into waking:
Talitha cumi.
Little one, arise.
What tenderness there is in that thought.
That the One who holds our breath through the night is also the One who calls us back into the day.
That waking is not merely a biological event, but a gift. A summons. A mercy.
And perhaps that is why I am less afraid than I once was.
Because every day I am being taught:
letting go is not always the end.
Sometimes it is the way we are carried toward morning.
Sometimes the dark is not abandonment, but keeping.
Sometimes what feels like disappearance is only the hidden side of being held.
And one day, when the last letting go comes, perhaps it will not be as foreign as we feared.
Perhaps it will be like all the little practice runs that came before it.
A yielding.
A resting.
A being carried where we cannot follow ourselves.
And then, at last, a waking into a brighter morning still.
A sun we cannot yet imagine.
A voice we have always known.
Calling us once more by name.
Little one, arise.
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© Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.