day no. 15,816: when our eyes with sleep are girt, be our hearts to Thee alert

"The ancients had a persistent sense of man's helplessness while sleeping, of the kinship of sleep with death, of the devil's cunning in making a man fall when he is defenseless. So they prayed for the protection of the holy angels and their golden weapons, for the heavenly hosts, at the time when Satan would gain power over them. Most remarkable and profound is the ancient church's prayer that when our eyes are closed in sleep God may nevertheless keep our hearts awake. It is the prayer that God may dwell with us and in us even though we are unconscious of His presence, that He may keep our hearts pure and holy in spite of all the cares and temptations of the night, to make our hearts ever alert to hear His call and, like the boy Samuel, answer Him even in the night: 'Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth' (I Sam. 3 : 9). Even in sleep we are in the hands of God or in the power of evil. Even in sleep God can perform His wonders upon us or evil bring us to destruction. So we pray at evening: 

'When our eyes with sleep are girt,
Be our hearts to Thee alert;
Shield us, Lord, with Thy right arm,
Save us from sin's dreadful harm.' - Martin Luther

But over the night and over the day stands the word of the Psalter: 'The day is thine, the night also is thine' (Ps. 74:16)." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Sleep is often used as a euphemism for death because it has so much in common with it.  When we lay ourselves down to sleep at night, we entrust ourselves to our faithful Creator to raise us up from it as our faithful Sustainer come the morning. We entrust our hearts and heads to His protection while we retreat to a place where self-defense is incapacitated. Yet even in our sleep and dreams we can be united to Christ and made to grow in wisdom and faith. Just as we by faith will hand ourselves completely over to God after our death, we practice now by doing the same every evening by laying down our lives when we lay ourselves down to sleep. In physically laying our body down we are acting out and incarnating a spiritual reality of laying ourselves down in the hope of being raised both body and spirit come morning. The trust that the day was His, that the night is and that tomorrow will be no different is practice for the Day when body and soul we will be raised to eternal life.