I am a heavy sleeper. I love sleep and people who know me will tell you that I really do need 9-10 hrs of sleep a night to be my joyful self. So I go to bed early. Like at 9pm. I know! But I have learned that if I want to get all the sleeps, I have to forgo the TV and all that stuff and get into bed. I have even gone back to reading ‘dead tree’ books, as my husband affectionately calls them, to minimize the chances of falling into the endlessness of internet only to find that I’ve scrolled my way to midnight and kick myself because what had I actually read/seen that as worth losing precious shut eye?
All that to say, once I’m asleep, there isn’t much that wakes me. One of my children crying is one thing I ALWAYS hear no matter how asleep I am (fellow mommas nodding, right?) Another is the Holy Spirit. And that’s about it. Last night I was out cold, and had been for a few hrs, when I woke up for no apparent reason. When I say woke up, I mean wide awake! I looked at the time, after midnight, and then looked around the room. Nothing. Looked out into the hall and saw the bathroom light was on. And I said a quick thank you prayer because I knew then that one of my kids was sick. It wasn’t the fact that the light was on, cause my kids get up to pee in the middle of the night too. It was that I had been asleep and woke up for no apparent reason to find the bathroom light on. I knew this was a gentle nudging from Jesus.
I walked into the bathroom and found Judah a mess. He looked awful and told me he felt equally so. I asked him what was wrong and he said “my belly really hurt like I needed to poop but I was too late. And I feel like I’m gonna throw up”. I told him is was totally fine and I would clean it all up. And I looked in his face and saw how embarrassed he was. So I got down next to him and said, “Hey Bug. I’m sorry this happened. Don’t feel bad about it ok? It’s so easy to fix this mess and it is 100% not your fault. This is the chemo rearing it’s ugly head.”
I prayed over him and for him, got him cleaned up and back in bed, and then set to cleaning up the hall and bathroom. While I cleaned I felt a crushing sadness. A feeling of helplessness. Weakness. How do we get Judah through this? What will it even look like to get him through this? And then there was the black hole…the what if’s taking over. I wish I could tell you I prayed or got my bible and read or even sang a worship song to myself. But I did none of those things. I scrubbed the floors and bathroom and cleaned myself up and crawled back in bed. I chose to ignore my feelings in hopes that they would go away if I just went to sleep. I slept horribly. I woke the next morning ‘tight’ inside. I knew I needed Jesus but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Him. So Jesus crossed lines to get to me.
My phone pinged. A simple text message popped up on my phone. “I’m praying for you right now.” That’s all it said. But it’s all it needed to say. Cause in that moment I felt God’s love for me. And that made it possible for the walls to come down and me to see Jesus.
Sometimes the Holy Spirit wakes us up in the middle of the night. Sometimes He urges us to send a note, a text, to make a call. Sometimes He brings a friend to mind. My advice is to heed that prompting. Jesus may be using you to pull someone out of the the back hole of despair.