daily java

Daily Java:

Likewise, two people lying close together can keep each other warm. But how can one be warm alone? (Ecclesiastes 4:11)

There is a real joy in sleeping with your wife for a long time. And that joy is beyond anything sexual. It is the joy of being with another person in a long-term relationship.

In fact, there may even be a time when the sexual relationship may have to go. Illness, failing health, age – something may be in the way. But the sleeping together continues.

There are several things that come from sleeping together for a long time that are very good.

One is just the simple fact that someone is there at night with you. You are not alone. You reach your foot over, or you reach out to touch or you just hear someone else breathing – and you know that you are not alone. For all its freedoms and lack of restrictions, there is a loneliness in bachelorhood. Married people go a lot of adjustment sleeping with someone else, but after a while they learn the rhythms, the noises, the breathing – all things that come from close association with other people while they are asleep.

And that is the way God intended it. Two people learn to adjust and to fall into this association. The association for the most part is spent by yourself, asleep. But it is also spent asleep with someone else, who is also asleep.

The second is safety. My wife woke me one night to tell me that something was burning. If it had been left to me, I would have burned up, the way I sleep. It helps during sickness as the other is aware of what is going on with you and whether or not you need help.

The third is warmth. There is a lot of shared warmth under a blanket when two people are there. That is good on strong winter nights. And you notice when your wife is gone because the bed is that much colder.

The fourth is kind of like the first, but it is companionship. Lying at night holding hands, she lies on your arm and you talk. The talking you do is that of old friends and is different than the talking you do in the daytime. It is intimate and a time in which you talk about dreams and sorrows, wishes and disappointments, things that are hard to talk about in the cold light of day. You laugh together, cry together, think together. You move in a rhythm that is possible in no other way.

You know each other well, you have seen each other in literally every fact of life and it comes to a time when there is little to surprise you about the other. And you are comfortable in this relationship.

You love this woman and she loves you. And you lie in bed in the most natural, unartificial way it is possible to be in. Your hearts are open to each as much as your bodies. And you drift off to sleep in the knowledge that neither of you would do anything to hurt the other, that when it comes down to it, you would each die for the other.

To reduce sleeping with each other to just the one night stand of sex is to demean it by making it artificial and shallow. There is a depth of human experience in sharing the common sleeping robe, lying together under the stars, sleeping a bedroom in a mobile home, sleeping in a mansion.

The sleeping experience is not necessarily all sexual, but it is deep and rich and strong. You commit yourself to sleeping with one person and you do it for years and years, until it becomes more natural than sleeping by yourself. By yourself, you have lost something. With each other,  you are complete, natural, in place.

You are together. And that is where you belong.