“...then sleeps and wakes night and day.” — Mark 4:27a (CEB)

After scattering the seed, the farmer does something radical: he goes to bed. He wakes up. He goes to bed again. He returns to the ordinary rhythm of daily life.

This might be the most countercultural line in the parable. We live in a culture that says if something matters, you should be working on it constantly. Monitoring it. Optimizing it. Losing sleep over it. But the farmer in Jesus’ story sleeps just fine. Not because he doesn’t care about the harvest, but because he understands that growth isn’t his job.

There’s a kind of faithfulness that looks like rest. The parent who has said everything they can say to their teenager and now has to wait. The person in recovery who has done the work today and trusts tomorrow to God. The church leader who planted a ministry and has to let it find its own roots.

Sleeping and waking isn’t laziness. It’s trust. It’s the farmer saying, “I’ve done my part. The rest belongs to the soil and the seed and whatever mystery makes things grow.”

God who works while we sleep, teach us the faithfulness of rest. Free us from the need to monitor every seed we’ve planted and trust the growing to you. Amen.

Andrew Conard’s Substack

Then Sleeps and Wakes Night and Day