It is very early in the morning and I am having trouble sleeping. It is appropriate, I suppose, that I've been at work preparing Edward Young's 18th century poetic meditations on suffering for republication. The poem begins thus:

Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy Sleep!
He, like the world, his ready visit pays
Where Fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes:
Swift on his downy pinion flies from woe,
And lights on lids unsullied with a tear.

From short (as usual) and disturb’d repose,
I wake: how happy they, who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
I wake, emerging from a sea of dreams
Tumultuous; where my wreck’d desponding thought,
From wave to wave of fancied misery,
At random drove, her helm of reason lost.
Though now restored, ‘tis only change of pain:
(A bitter change!) severer for severe:
The day too short for my distress; and night,
Even in the zenith of her dark domain,
Is sunshine to the colour of my fate.

A sad day, the events of Thursday, reminding us that we live in a time of war. Perhaps that contributes to the difficulty in sleeping. And yet, God remains faithful, and he loves us, no matter how it might look at any given moment.