Chemistry may bring people together, but it’s character that keeps them together.

Homer begins his tale of Odysseus this way: “Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost.” Few works have captured the imagination like The Iliad and The Odyssey. The timeless story of The Odyssey has been repackaged for a modern audience in Christopher Nolan’s recent movie. His retelling is at its best when it’s faithful to Homer’s classic and veers off course with its modern additions. Picking up the book is well worth it. First-time readers may appreciate Emily Wilson’s fast-paced and readable translation, or take their time in the more poetic translation by Robert Fitzgerald. But what makes Homer’s epic poem a classic cornerstone of Western literature? Odysseus is presented as a complex mystery. He’s the genius behind the triumph over Troy. The glory of the victory falls to his ingenuity and cleverness. And yet, The Odyssey opens with him far from home, broken and enslaved, while his wife’s suitors pilfer his home. Homer’s Odyssey stands the test of time because it recognizes the enigma—the mystery—of humanity’s glory and misery. The phrase “Tell me about a complicated man” resounds through history. Retellings of Odysseus’s story keep coming because every generation wrestles with the same question about the complexity of being human. Glory and the Misery In the ancient Greek worldview, fame and glory were desired above all else. The Iliad displays the drive to accomplish glorious exploits in battle and earn fame and recognition. Heroic deeds were viewed as the way to achieve a type of immortal life—forever remembered in the songs of poets and hearts of people. Odysseus earned this glory and honor. His fame, he claims, “extends to high heaven.” The poets and musicians sing his praise. He earned the glory the Greeks prize. Ironically, though, nearly every time Odysseus’s praise is sung in The Odyssey, it ends in tears and grief. His wife, Penelope, cries out to stop these songs of Odysseus’s fame because they break her heart. His glorious fame, after all, came at the cost of losing his family and home. But it isn’t only Odysseus’s wife who responds to the songs of his glory with tears. Odysseus himself comes to know the shallow folly of the “glory” he earned. The price is severe: unrelenting suffering for 19 years. In The Odyssey, even those who obtained the most glory in The Iliad are now languishing in the underworld. One of these dead heroes laments that he would exchange the glory he’d earned to simply be a living servant. This glory is hollow and means little in light of the present misery. Getting Glory Wrong Homer taps into the human longing for glory and the fact that, left to our own devices, we misunderstand this glory. Longing for glory is part of what it means to be human. We have eternity etched on our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). We long for eternal glory to bask in. But this glory isn’t our own, and we aren’t allowed to define it. The history of humanity is a history of misidentifying the glory we hunger for—and how to achieve it. When we exchange the glory of the eternal God for our fame and accomplishments, we’re always left in misery and suffering, even when we achieve the glory. When we exchange the glory of the eternal God for our fame and accomplishments, we’re always left in misery and suffering, even when we achieve the glory. The Odyssey asks the right questions about humanity: What is this complicated being? How do we face suffering and survive? What is the key to the good life? It even presents a partially right answer: True glory isn’t found in war or achievements; it’s found in the joy of home. Odysseus isn’t complete until he wins back his wife and son, accepts the good limitations of home, and gives up fighting. Satisfaction is found in a faithful marriage and family. Nolan’s Odyssey affirms this but adds the message of overcoming past trauma and living in hope for the future: “Give up the fight, give up control, and live.” God’s Definition of Glory This presentation of the good life, though, is incomplete. Homer’s vision falls short of the glory God has designed humans for. So does Nolan’s. The biblical concept of man’s glory is far different from the ancient Greeks’ and its modern retelling. The Bible tells us about a complicated man—Jesus Christ—who ventures far from the splendors of heaven (Phil. 2:1–11). The God-man doesn’t journey as One who wanders and is lost. He comes to seek and save lost, complicated humanity (Luke 19:10). The biblical concept of man’s glory is far different from the ancient Greeks’ and its modern retelling. As one of the church fathers says, “The glory of God is a living man.” God’s glory is this man: Jesus Christ. In Jesus, humanity’s glory and misery collide and find their resolution. Our glory and satisfaction in life can only be found in knowing him. Our hunger for glory and satisfaction is ultimately a hunger for God himself. The Odyssey recognizes what Herman Bavinck calls the “greatness and miserableness of man.” But Homer cannot resolve this complexity as God does in his Word. As Bavinck reminds us: “The Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can only be found in God.” Odysseus was an enigma, a complicated man who raised questions about life. The ancient poets and modern filmmakers can only pose these questions and give half answers. But God speaks over us the path and promise of living in the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).

For a season, I was raising a spy. My son went through a short but intense season of operating a local “spy business.” He walked around with special spy goggles featuring one blue lens and one red lens. While people giggled at his gear, he was seeing hidden depths in ordinary occurrences. In The Wisdom of Sleep: How Rest Reveals God’s Truth and Revives Weary Souls, Brett McCracken, senior editor and director of communications at The Gospel Coalition, offers readers a similar pair of lenses to see something as ordinary and familiar as sleep with depth and discernment. While reading an entire book on sleep might sound like a sleep aid to some, McCracken’s approach helps us to see sleep as interesting, invigorating, and even awe-inducing. Peering through the two lenses of general and special revelation and thus practicing “creational theology,” McCracken invites readers to ponder sleep through “God’s Word and God’s world, . . . a powerful interpretative combo for making sense of things” (8). Seen through these spy goggles, sleep takes on a whole new topography—biological limitations are seen as features rather than flaws, and dreams have new depth. The more we peer into the perplexities of sleep, the better we’re postured to worship the God who both created and enables it. Loving Limitations In a cultural moment that proliferates the twin illusions of limitlessness and control, sleep is a biologically installed governor, keeping our pride and penchant for busyness in check. Sleep is a biologically installed governor, keeping our pride and penchant to busyness in check. According to McCracken, believers should “be the first to reject digital life’s illusion of disembodied limitlessness.” However, we’re often susceptible to “secular tenets such as unbridled freedom, bodily autonomy, and a ‘no sleep until I’m dead’ obsession with achievement” (18). Sleep stops the charade as our creaturely need for cessation levels the playing field—and all our attempts to create modern-day towers of Babel. But God’s good design for sleep goes even further: It models the very shape of the gospel. As McCracken argues, God made us so that one-third of our lives is spent doing nothing but lying flat, eyes closed, unproductive, and passively receiving the gift of replenishing repose. He designed us so that daily we assume a physical state that bears unmistakable resemblance to death, only to “resurrect” hours later feeling miraculously energized and enlivened. In our sleep-wake cycle we enact nothing less than the gospel arc itself: not just life after death but life from death. (7) In a me-centric culture, habits of healthy rest offer more than a glow-up. Sleep isn’t just good for us. It helps us love our neighbor. Protecting bedtimes and honoring others’ limitations can become “a ministry of spreading rest that glorifies the God of rest” (78). The consumer market offers sleep hacks. The scientific community uncovers the biological brilliance behind sleep. Meanwhile, at the back of sleep, believers see their Savior. Even those who struggle to slumber—every good gift has been corrupted by the fall—have a chance to cling to God’s promise to give his beloved sleep (Ps. 127:2). Deep Dreams Beyond rest, sleep also gives us opportunities to dream, something that has fascinated the human mind for millennia. Neuroscientists are barely beginning to understand the whys and wherefores of what happens in our skulls while we snore. Some scientists posit that “the dreaming brain is sorting through cognitive inputs, trying to discern what to absorb and what to discard” (53). Others claim a more creative cause for dreaming, likening it to “a creative workspace” in which “ideas can percolate, possibilities emerge, connections can be forged, and rough sketches can be attempted” (55). Some scientists take the angle that dreaming is a time for “mental mapping and future-priming exploration of possibilities”—the mind’s chance to play out different potentials with low risk at a time of low consciousness (57). In a me-centric culture, habits of healthy rest offer more than a glow up. Sleep isn’t just good for us. It helps us love our neighbor. No matter how you slice it, we should stand in awe of all that God freighted into humanity’s nonwaking hours. The Scriptures are replete with examples of God using dreams to steer, convict, and instruct. We ought not to be surprised that a limitless, boundless Creator equips his image-bearers with minds capable of such depth when dozing. Even dreams in which we act unbecomingly can be used as pointers to the depths of God’s grace—they remind us of our need for the gospel. Whether Waking or Sleeping Sleeping is one thing, but learning to rest with our eyes open is another. Thankfully, God has given his people patterns of rest that extend beyond our beds. In physical sleep, our bodies lie prone; in Sabbath, our souls learn to live in the same posture. McCracken observes, “The heart of Sabbath is remembrance and receptivity of God’s provision, a conscious letting go of our anxious urge to control, hoard, acquire, nervously scroll or swipe” (89). Our culture prioritizes optimization and often presents rest as a key to productivity. McCracken challenges that approach, asking, “What if sleep, rest, and Sabbath are gifts meant to mold us to the contours of grace, rather than hacks for our wellness or rewards for our striving?” (136). Behind the Sabbath is the God who spoke both time and matter into existence. “God is perfectly at rest in himself. He needs no object of love beyond himself,” observes McCracken. “Yet as an utterly free act, he created us for his glory, and we glorify him by entering his rest” (106). We can trust in the God who upholds everything as we seem to do nothing (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3). By running our lives along the grain of God’s good design for work and rest, waking and sleeping, rather than against it, we show off the beauty of his design. We don’t need spy goggles to understand God’s grace, but sometimes we may need a sleep mask. The Wisdom of Sleep reminds us that rest—whether waking or sleeping—is an act of worship.

If we are in Christ, we can have confidence that God is at work in our lives, pouring out His mercy and grace and transforming us to look more like Christ.

After a challenging past experience left them feeling overwhelmed and alone in the water, Joe recounts a transformative return to Malibu's waves, guided by surfing legend Bethany Hamilton, that reshaped their understanding of perseverance.