What Matthew 11:28 Looks Like When You Cannot Sleep
Matthew 11:28 says: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
I have read that verse on coffee mugs. I have heard it preached at funerals. I have seen it on the wall of a hospital waiting room, of all places, in a font that was trying too hard to be comforting.
For most of my life, it did nothing for me.
The problem was the word rest. I read it as sleep. I read it as a spa day. I read it as the absence of problems, which is what I thought I needed. If I was tired, rest meant going to bed. If I was worried, rest meant solving the problem. If I was sad, rest meant waiting for it to pass.
None of that is what the verse says. But I could not see that until I went through something that made sleep impossible and solutions unavailable, and the verse was all I had.
It was a Sunday night in November, about four months into a season I did not know how to name.
Nothing catastrophic had happened. No one had died. I had not lost my job. My marriage was fine. But something had gone wrong inside me - slowly, over months - and by that November, I could not sleep.
Not “had trouble sleeping.” Could not sleep. I would get into bed at eleven, and my body would lie there as if it had been told to be still and had agreed, but my mind would not stop. It would run through the same set of thoughts in a loop. A conversation from six years ago. A decision I had made. A fear about a thing that had not happened and might not happen. There was no logic to it. There was no solving it. It was just noise, on repeat, in the dark.
I tried everything people told me to try. Melatonin. No screens after nine. Warm milk. Reading. Cold showers. I got a sleep app and it told me I was getting three to four hours of actual sleep a night and I believed it.
By that Sunday, I had been going on about ten days of almost no sleep. My face had started to feel strange. I could not remember what it was like to be rested. I did not know if I was depressed or anxious or sick or just tired, and I did not have the energy to find out.
That night, lying in the dark at about 2 a.m., I did something I had not done in years. I opened the Bible on my phone. Not to read a passage. Not to look for a verse. Just to read something that was not my own thoughts.
I landed on Matthew 11 without looking for it. I read the verse. And for the first time, I saw the word come.
Here is what I did next, and I want to be honest about it because it sounds small.
I did not pray for sleep. I had been praying for sleep for a week. That prayer had not worked, and repeating it did not feel honest.
Instead, I did what the verse says. I came. Not to sleep. To Him. I said, out loud, in the dark, “I am here. I do not have anything to say. I am just here.”
That was the whole prayer. I did not ask for anything. I did not claim a promise. I did not rebuke the insomnia. I just said I was there, and then I lay there in the dark being there, with the verse open on my phone.
I did not fall asleep immediately. I fell asleep at around 4 a.m., about the same as the previous nights. But something was different. I was not fighting. The thoughts kept running, but I was not running after them. I was just there, in the dark, in the presence of the One the verse had told me to come to, waiting for my body to do whatever it was going to do.
Over the next few weeks, the sleep came back. Slowly, not instantly. Some nights were still bad. But the difference between a bad night and a bad night with the verse was a real difference. The bad nights with the verse were shorter. Not because sleep came faster. Because I stopped fighting the night.
I still cannot sleep some nights.
I have not been healed of whatever that November was. I do not know what it was. It comes back in seasons, and it goes away in seasons, and I have stopped trying to name it.
But I read Matthew 11:28 differently now. Not as a promise of sleep. Not as a promise that the burden will be removed. As an invitation to bring the burden to a specific person.
Come to me. Not come to sleep. Not come to a solution. Not come to a version of your life where this does not happen. Come to Me.
That is the whole verse. Everything else - the rest, the ease, the lightness - is something that happens between the coming and the sleeping. Sometimes it happens in the same night. Sometimes it does not happen at all, and you just lie there being there, and that is enough.
I do not know why the verse helps some nights and not others. I do not know why some people are healed of insomnia and some are not. I am not going to invent an answer. What I know is that on the nights when I cannot sleep, the verse says come, and I come, and I lie there in the dark with nothing to say, and that is the whole practice.
It is not a cure. It is a place to be at 2 a.m. That has turned out to be enough.