Few activities in life are as strange as sleep.

It’s the single activity we do more than any other, with about one-third of each day and one-third of our lives spent asleep. And we don’t have much choice about participating, either. Sleep is so essential to the functioning of our bodies that if we go too long without it we’ll die. While we could survive a month or two without food, we can’t survive much more than a week without sleeping. (The longest recorded time a human being has gone without sleep is 11 days and 25 minutes.)

From a human perspective sleep doesn’t make much sense. But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we need to think of it from God’s perspective. In his book, The God of All Things, Andrew Wilson says, “It might be more helpful to say that the world is theomorphic: things take the form they do because they are created to reveal God.”

Joe Deegan points out this theomorphic connection of sleep in his recent article, Reading Resurrection in the Book of Nature. Deegan considers the possibility that sleep was created to reveal something about God. “Could it be that in the daily cycle of sleeping and waking,” he asks, “God is reminding his children again and again that resurrection is not a tall tale but something woven through the fabric of his creation?”

In this week after Easter Sunday, let’s join Deegan in reflecting on how the sleep-to-waking cycle points us to the hope we have in the death-to-life cycle of the resurrection.