I was recently listening to an episode of the popular radio show This American Life entitled “Fear of Sleep.” The host of the program said his own fear of sleep began when he was six years old and his uncle was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Realizing that his relative was in mortal danger made him suddenly and vividly aware of his own mortality. “I knew I was going to die, and my mom and dad couldn’t help me. Nobody could help me,” he explained. “I would be dead. Forever.” He began to fear sleep, too, because, for him, the condition of sleep too closely paralleled the condition of death.
The host was not alone. His guests described waking up in the midst of “a complete instant panic attack,” clutching the bed and crying out “no, no, no, no!” One of the guests explained, “It is not an irrational fear. You understand that you’re mortal. Your life is going to be over at some point. You’re fighting the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed, rolling around in your sheets and your blankets, and you’re rolling around there trying to fight death, and there is no way you can win.”
I felt terrible for these people. But not for the reason you might think. Waking up terrified is not an enviable experience, but the really terrible thing was that you could tell from the nature of the testimony that here was a group of people without faith. Indeed, the unsaved have reason to awake trembling in the night!
Christians, on the other hand, are not fighting death alone in the night because Jesus has already fought that battle for us—and he has won our souls’ way to everlasting peace. For the faithful, there is nothing to fear in death. As Paul wrote, for the dedicated Christian “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21).
Another of the guests on the show, a woman, said, “I cry and I just get really sad….and I just think: ‘there is nothing I can do.’ The terror is overtaken by sadness. I just want it to not be true.” To hear her lament was heart-wrenching. I wanted to be able to speak back to the radio and tell her, “But it’s really not true!” The tragedy is not that these individuals live in fear of sleep, but that they have not yet found the salvation that would put their fears to rest. Death is not “forever.” There is a way we can win. There is something we each can do. If we follow the plan of salvation laid out in the gospels, we need not fear death. We can sleep well, knowing that God watches over our bodies, but more importantly, that He keeps our souls.
-Tyler Walker, The Weekly Bulletin, October 13, 2013