Look at where these people slept.
Jesus. A home in Nazareth, recreated the way it looked in his day. See the mat rolled up against the wall?
St. Charbel. His cell in the mountains of Lebanon. A horsehair mat on the ground and a log for a pillow.
St. Francis. The rock on Isola Maggiore, an island in Lake Trasimeno, where he spent Lent alone. This was his bed.
St. John Vianney. His room in Ars, France, kept as he left it. He had a plain bed and often left it for the floor or a board, with a log under his head.
Notice anything?
They all slept low. Close to the ground, on something thin and hard. A mat. A rock. A board. A log under the head. The saints were copying Jesus.
Jesus said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The one time the Gospels show him asleep, he’s in the back of a fishing boat in a storm with his head on a rower’s cushion. Waves are coming over the side, and he’s out cold.
Here’s what gets me. The Greek for “lay his head” is the same phrase John uses at the cross: “he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” The man who had nowhere to lay his head finally laid it down on the wood.
Even Julius Caesar understood this. He could have had a feather bed. Plutarch says he slept outdoors and in his chariot on purpose, to make a sickly body strong.
Our beds are new. The spring mattress only caught on in the 1920s. For most of history, people slept on a mat on the floor. The word mattress even comes from Arabic: the place where something is thrown down.
Does a soft mattress ruin your back? I looked, and honestly, the research doesn’t say that. But it does say this: people who can sit down on the floor and stand back up without using their hands live longer. Every point on that test cut the risk of death by about a fifth.
Sleep on the floor and you take that test every night and every morning.
We moved our family to Japanese futons on the floor in January 2021. Within weeks, Joelle’s morning back pain was gone. Our kids don’t know any other way.
Most of Jesus’ life isn’t written down. We don’t know what he ate for breakfast or how he rolled up his mat. But we know enough. He slept low, he slept anywhere, and he slept in peace.
His life is the fullest human life there has ever been. That means no part of ours sits off to the side. Eating, working, walking, sleeping: every one of them can be brought under him and shaped to look like his. The saints understood that. They didn’t stop at the Sermon on the Mount. They followed him all the way down to the bed.
So the bed counts too. If he owns my work and my words, he owns how I lie down at night.
Luxury isn’t a plush bed. It’s a strong back, and a life shaped like his, all the way down to where you lay your head.
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