The middle of the night

My wife says God gets people up in the middle of the night so they will pray. I just read an article which says that prayer is an effort to find out what God is doing. So I guess my prayer is, what are you doing Lord, getting me up in the middle of the night?

I’ve been pretty sullen and irascible lately and I’m not proud of it. I probably deserve a little insomnia. I’m just in a place - you know what I mean? I don’t want to be melodramatic, but this image seems to fit: I feel like a prisoner in a cell with one high window through which he can see only the blue sky. The prisoner knows there’s something more and something good, but this ain’t it.

As I pray to discern what God is up to in my life, I find it hard just to listen and to wait. Prayer doesn’t seem like prayer unless I’m running my mouth. In my prayer, though, it’s helpful for me not to have to explain things too much. God, after all, is God. I don’t have to give Him all the fine points, for example, of a job I have waiting for me to do. God understands that I have to do this and do that, this call to make, that research to do. He understands my embarrassment for taking so long to finish and my anxiety about being able to do things right. God knows.

Usually what happens to me – in prayer in the middle of the night which God has awakened me for so He can tell me what He is doing – is that I begin to offload my troubles onto Him. I know He’s going to be up, and I’m trying to get some sleep. The circumstances and things of my life begin to flood my consciousness. As soon as something or someone comes to mind, I simply offer it or him or her to the Lord. It’s like: “Yeah, this situation, Lord. I can’t do anything about it.” Or I will think of someone I know and I will say, “Bless her, Lord. I don’t know what to do about her circumstances, but You do.” And on and on. I don’t spend too much time on any one person or thing, because so many people and things in my life compete for attention in this prayerful presence before God. I can’t concentrate, so I don’t bother to try. I simply try to fix my awareness on the Lord and ask Him to see and experience and be a part of all things that are on my mind. Usually this is a very satisfying kind of prayer.

I’m not a great issues person; I’m an ordinary person. God hasn’t called me to scale the peaks or to achieve much of anything spectacular in a worldly sense. That has bothered me in the past, but more lately it has been a comfort to me that God has finally realized that I’m not Mr. Big.

There is something good in the simplicity of having one’s half acre to plow. God has blessed my wife and me with three children, and I do have a tremendously loving wife. We have a small house and a car to get around in, and a cat. We have friends who love us and friends we love. We have old friends. We want for nothing. My job is, well, as I’ve tried to explain before: this is my job. My employers are good, decent, God-fearing, fair-minded, caring people. What further blessings could a person want?

Still I have the effrontery to sulk from time to time. You know what it is? Immaturity. Childishness. I have not put away former things and put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

God has given me so much raw material to work with. As I squint and strain to see what Christian maturity might look like, surely I see that God has called me to holiness in the place where I am. I might make a pilgrimage and I am indeed a kin of the world community. But this is the place where Jesus expects me to find Him – here, in these little digs. Here I am to be obedient, willing, surrendered. This is where the Lord expects to find me when He shakes me and wakes me up in the middle of the night and tells me what He’s going to do. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on May 17th, 1987