Erin Shannon

Sandra fell asleep during prayer requests on a Tuesday morning in February. Nobody laughed. Twelve women in the room, and not one of us was surprised. Sandra fell asleep during prayer requests on the second Tuesday of February. Sitting straight up on my couch, coffee still in her hand. Nobody laughed. That's the part I can't stop thinking about. Twelve women in the room and not one of us was surprised. I've led the same Tuesday morning women's Bible study for 19 years. Same living room, same couch, mostly the same women. I'm 61. I taught third grade for three decades before I retired, so I know what tired looks like. And I keep a notebook. Every prayer request, every week, going back to 2007. It started as a way to remember who to follow up with. It turned into something else. Because after the Sandra thing, I flipped back through it. In 2012 the requests were about kids and jobs and a roof that needed replacing. Five or six years ago they started to change. Pray for my energy. Pray I can sleep. Pray I feel like myself again. Page after page. Almost every woman in that room over 50 had asked for some version of the same thing. And every one of us had heard the same answer from a doctor's office. Bloodwork's normal. It's just menopause. It's just perimenopause. It's just your age. Try to nap. As if we hadn't thought of napping. If you had told me in February that an answer to half those pages was sitting in Psalm 12, a chapter I have personally taught, I would have politely asked you to leave my living room. But hold that thought. Because that's exactly where this is going. Dee gets up to change her shirt three times a night. She'd been sleeping on a towel for two years, and she told us like she was reporting a parking ticket. Pam taught Sunday school for 25 years, then lost her words in the middle of a lesson last fall and laughed it off as a senior moment. She's 58. And between the twelve of us, we had tried everything. Magnesium. Melatonin. Black cohosh. Cooling pillows. Dee's $300 weighted blanket. Pam's estrogen patches that gave her three good weeks and then quit on her. Here's my confession. In 19 years of writing down everyone's requests, I never once wrote down my own. I'm the leader. I'm the one who prays over everybody. Meanwhile I was waking up at 2:47 almost every night, soaked through my collar, heart going like I'd been running, lying there until the birds started. I'd read the same paragraph of lesson prep four times. My knees made me think twice about the garden kneeler. My own doctor ran the full panel last year. Normal, normal, normal. So I told myself what we'd all been told. This is just the season I'm in. Last fall I drafted an email handing the study over to someone younger. I never sent it. But I wrote it. (My husband Walt says the notebook makes me sound like church FBI. He is not entirely wrong.) Then Sandra missed a month of Tuesdays. Her daughter had a baby in Phoenix, so she flew out to help. When she walked back into my living room in April, I did an actual double take. It wasn't a haircut. It wasn't the Arizona sun. She looked rested. She looked like Sandra from ten years ago. She fell asleep on my couch in February. Now she was the sharpest one in the room. I cornered her by the coffee after everyone left. What happened to you. She laughed and said, "You're going to think I've lost it." Her niece in Phoenix had put something on the guest bed. A sheet with silver fiber woven through it that plugs into the wall. A grounding sheet. Sandra said she rolled her eyes so hard the first night she nearly pulled something. Then she slept eight hours. In a strange bed. At her age. She blamed travel exhaustion. Then it happened the next night. And the next. For four weeks. "I ordered my own before I even flew home," she said. I was already reaching for the polite face I use when somebody brings essential oils to Bible study. I have spent years gently steering women in my group away from miracle products. Sandra knew exactly what my face was doing. She said, "Ask me what time you wake up at night." What? "What time. You always look wrecked on Tuesdays. What time do you wake up?" 2:47, I told her. Almost on the dot. "Same time every night?" Almost every night. My doctor says that's normal for my age. And then Sandra, retired bookkeeper, 36 years of payroll, said the thing that has been rattling around in my head ever since. Her niece had explained it like this. That clockwork 2 or 3am wake-up, the soaked shirt, the racing heart. That's cortisol. The body's stress alarm spiking at the exact hours it should be at its lowest. And one thing that can keep that alarm twitchy is charge. Our bodies pick it up all day from everything running and plugged in around us, what some people call dirty electricity, and it has nowhere to go. For most of human history, people slept in contact with the ground and discharged it every night. We sleep on foam, in second-floor bedrooms, completely insulated. Eight hours a night where the body could be discharging and recalibrating, and instead it just holds the alarm. A bedsheet, Sandra. Really. "Not the sheet," she said. "The wall. Every outlet in your house has that third round hole nobody thinks about. It's the ground line. It connects your house to the earth itself. You plug the sheet into that, and because silver conducts, your body is connected to the ground all night. Same as sleeping in the grass, minus the grass. The silver is just the messenger." Then she nodded at my coffee like she was reading my mind. "And think about everything we've all tried. The melatonin, the magnesium, the cooling pillows. All of it manages the symptom. None of it touches the charge. You can't supplement your way out of a circuit that was never closed." I stood there wanting to argue and unable to find the handle. Then she said the part that got me. "You know what made me stop feeling silly about it? Psalm 12:6. Go home and read it." I have taught Psalm 12. The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace, purified seven times. I have read that verse more times than I can count, and I had never once stopped on the word silver. That night I sat at my kitchen table with my concordance like a student. Silver is everywhere in Scripture once you start looking. It's the metal God uses when He talks about refining His people. Joseph was sold for silver. The temple treasury counted in it. And in Exodus, when God gave Moses the design for the Tabernacle, the bases holding the whole structure to the desert floor were silver. Of all things. The part that touched the ground. And the more I read about the science side, the more the two stories sounded like one story. The ground was made to hold a charge. Our bodies were made to release one. Every generation before ours slept inside that design without knowing it had a name. We're the first ones who built our way out of it. I want to be careful here, because I do not believe God hides product recommendations in the Psalms. That is not what this was. But I do believe in paying attention. And I had spent six years lying awake at 2:47 asking for help while a woman on my own couch was handed an answer by her niece in Phoenix. So I did what I do. I researched it like a skeptic. I found a study where researchers used infrared imaging and 93 percent of participants showed a significant reduction in inflammation from grounding. Another where 96 percent reported feeling significantly more relaxed. Published work. Real numbers. Not a Facebook testimony. I still felt a little foolish at checkout. But they were running some massive sale when I looked, and right under the button it said 90 day money back guarantee. Three months to test it and send it back if nothing happened. I remember thinking, Lord, forgive me, and adding it to the cart. It looks like an ordinary sheet until the light catches it and you see the fine silver thread running through the weave in a grid. Walt watched me tuck the cord under the fitted sheet and plug our bed into the wall and asked if I was charging myself overnight now. I told him to hush. First night, nothing dramatic. I woke at 2:50, same as ever. But I fell back asleep faster than I had in years. By the end of the first week the wake-ups were shorter and quieter. Less soaked. Less heart-pounding. Somewhere in week three I realized I had slept through the night twice and hadn't even clocked it. Walt noticed before I said a word. Over eggs one morning: "You're not tossing anymore. Haven't felt you wake up all week." He had been keeping his own notebook, apparently. Just in his head. I told the group that Tuesday. I am constitutionally incapable of not telling the group. But because I am who I am, I also tested it. I unplugged the cord for four nights and told no one. By night three, 2:47 was back. Damp collar, tapping heart. I plugged it back in. Within two nights it went quiet again. That settled it for me. I've done it twice more since, because I still didn't quite trust it. Same result every time. I sleep through the night more often than I don't now. I teach the full lesson without losing my place. I said yes to a Friday dinner last week without doing math about what Saturday would cost me. And one morning last week, Walt looked at me across the table and said, "There you are." I had asked for help for six years. I had just been expecting it to arrive looking more spiritual than a cord and an outlet. Six of the twelve have one now. Dee took the towel off her bed in May, the first time in two years, and cried telling us about it. Pam texted me at 7am in all caps: I REMEMBERED EVERY NAME AT COFFEE HOUR. One warning, and I mean it. Brenda tried to save money and ordered a cheap version from Amazon. Three weeks, nothing. It turns out a lot of those are ordinary fabric with a silver finish on the surface. A few months of laundry and it's doing nothing, and now you've got a regular sheet and a story about how grounding doesn't work. She's since replaced it with the real one. The one the rest of us use is from a company called GroundingWell. Real silver fiber woven through organic cotton, not sprayed on. Over 900,000 people sleep on them, and after watching this move through my Bible study one woman at a time, I understand why. They're a smaller operation and they do sell out, which I only know because Pam had to wait two weeks for the one she ordered for her daughter. And that 90 day guarantee I leaned on is still there. Sleep on it for three months, and if nothing changes, send it back. That matters for women like us, because we have been burned before, and we are tired of being told the answer is to nap. In April, for the first time in 19 years, I wrote my own line in the notebook. Then I got to write one more word next to it. Answered. I won't tell you a sheet will do for you what it did for me. I'll tell you what I tell my group. Read first. Decide for yourself. There's a page that lays the whole thing out, the science and the women like us, and it's worth ten minutes before you spend a dollar. Read it here first, and make sure it's the real site, not a knockoff: https://www.groundingwell.com/pages/special-sheet-listicle-v2