If all goes according to plan, and if God wills, this should be the last night that Shawn is gone for awhile.
I don't mind saying, I miss him.
Tomorrow he flies home from Vancouver through Minneapolis and NYC (LaGuardia). It will be a very long day for him. I am supposed to pick him up at midnight in Syracuse.
I pray God keeps him safe and surrounds his airplanes with heavenly angels to bring him home.
I sometimes don't feel like going to bed when I am out of synch and out of sorts. Tonight I don't feel like going to bed. I haven't been able to eat dinner. I have a lump in my throat.
But tomorrow is another day, and I have things I need to do.
It is a good time for a bedtime Bible verse:
Psalm 127:2 (ESV)
In vain you rise early and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat --
for He grants sleep to those He loves.
. . . In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. . . Psalm 4:8 (ESV)
Showing posts with label God thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God thoughts. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Another Bedtime Bible Reading
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live;
in your name I will lift up my hands.
in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
when I remember you upon my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.
your right hand upholds me.
Psalm 63:1-8, ESV
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
A bedtime Bible reading
especially if my heart is not at peace. Here it is:
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
(ESV)
Friday, February 17, 2012
Eternity in the night
[this is a repost from my other blog]
Eternity scares me. It scares me the most when I think about it, which usually happens in the wee hours of the night when everyone is sleeping and it is just God and me. I lie on my bed, on my stomach, and feel like it is some sort of lilting platform, careening through time and space. I think, "I'm scared of the next life. I'm scared of living forever. I'm scared of being born into eternity."
In the daylight hours I am busy. What shall we do with the mixed up files with the mixed up statements from all the utilities and credit cards? What shall I make for dinner? Are those beans I'm cooking ever going to get soft enough to mash? What time is karate? Did I remember to wash the karate uniform? How about underwear? Are we out of clean underwear? Are we out of milk? Are we out of gas, can I make it to the oboe lesson?
During the daylight hours a thousand everyday prayers go up: Please help me to remember everything I need while I'm at the store. Please help me remember to switch over the laundry. Please help me find a parking space. Please help me merge onto the freeway. Please don't let the dog be sick. Thank you for the beautiful sunshine. Thank you for the great price on grapes this week. Where is Jon? Oh please, please keep him safe. Please help me not to lose my temper. Please forgive me for losing my temper. Please help me fix the trainwreck of my childrearing. Please help me find my sunglasses.
But at night everything changes. The nitty gritty of everyday fades away and big, scary thoughts loom, thoughts that take the bottom out of my stomach and leave me falling, even as I cling to the sides of my mattress. Heaven appears to me like a gigantic medieval church of stone, imposing, beautiful, gut-wrenching. The presence of God seems like outer space, limitless and (against my better judgment) dark, cold and airless. Eternity feels like a black hole that is sucking me in.
I know that God is not like that. He is love, light and joy. In His presence is fullness of joy. Jesus came that our joy may be complete. We love because He first loved us. He is our protector, teacher, guide, comforter and friend. To be with Him is to be free from pain, sorrow, boredom, sin and death.
In the daylight hours I know that Heaven is a wonderful place and I can look forward to getting there and seeing Jesus. In the daylight hours I can say, with honesty, "I'm not afraid of being dead; I'm just afraid of getting dead."
But at night, sometimes, the thought of eternity really scares me.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
When you can’t get to sleep
I have always had a hard time going to sleep.
Something about the quiet and the dark at night makes my imagination wake up and plague me with exhausting thoughts.
Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep, my husband can’t either, because I keep thinking of things and blurting them out. Poor husband.
I went through a phase where whenever I could not sleep, I prayed. I didn’t pray asking to go to sleep (well, I have done that, but that isn’t what this phase was about). Mostly, I prayed for my children, or other people whose struggles were known to me. Now, I think this is a very worthy thing to do. However, I think it is better to pray with my husband, out loud, for the children and other pressing prayer issues, and to do it before I try to go to sleep. Otherwise, it is easy to lose discipline and slip into doing something that I think is praying, but it is really worrying and fretting.
In terms of preparing my mind for sleep, this is one of the best mental exercises I have found:
Think lofty thoughts about God and try to grasp things about Him that are ungraspable.
It offers the following benefits:
You may ask, How do you come up with lofty thoughts to think about God?
Here are three ideas:
Of course, if the problem is not your mind but your body, these ideas might not help. Then again, they might. You never know until you try.
Something about the quiet and the dark at night makes my imagination wake up and plague me with exhausting thoughts.
Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep, my husband can’t either, because I keep thinking of things and blurting them out. Poor husband.
I went through a phase where whenever I could not sleep, I prayed. I didn’t pray asking to go to sleep (well, I have done that, but that isn’t what this phase was about). Mostly, I prayed for my children, or other people whose struggles were known to me. Now, I think this is a very worthy thing to do. However, I think it is better to pray with my husband, out loud, for the children and other pressing prayer issues, and to do it before I try to go to sleep. Otherwise, it is easy to lose discipline and slip into doing something that I think is praying, but it is really worrying and fretting.
In terms of preparing my mind for sleep, this is one of the best mental exercises I have found:
Think lofty thoughts about God and try to grasp things about Him that are ungraspable.
It offers the following benefits:
- I am thinking about God, so my thoughts are wholesome and pure.
- I am thinking about things that are beyond the human imagination, so I never get them figured out.
- I am thinking about things that are hard for me to understand, so I get tired.
You may ask, How do you come up with lofty thoughts to think about God?
Here are three ideas:
- Think through the attributes of God. You can just try to list them, or you can work on memorizing and remembering the Bible verses that explain them.
- Read a theological book about God that is just a little too hard for you. It should not be so hard for you that you cannot understand anything you are reading. It should just be a little bit too hard, so that you have to read a sentence over a few times, trying to figure out what the author means, and then, as you begin to unravel it, you just need to set the book down for a minute and close your eyes and ponder and ruminate... and all of sudden you have drifted away. I have a few books that work like this. There are two minor problems. Number one, watch out for the really heavy books (I’m talking physically heavy, hard cover, five-inch books). If they slide off the bed and hit the floor, it can make for a rude awakening. Number two, be sure you have a way to get the last light turned off. If turning off the last light goes along with closing your eyes to ruminate, you are golden.
- Listen to a good sermon on your CD alarm clock. There is nothing like turning the sermon on at a low volume--so you have to strain just a bit to hear--and lying down on your soft pillows in the dark. A particular pastor preached through the entire Bible, and we bought his sermon series. He is excellent, so I have to be careful to use sermons I’ve already heard when I apply this technique. I discovered it when Shawn used to travel a lot. Being frightened at night, I liked to hear this pastor’s reassuring voice in the night hours. I liked to have his words replacing the fearful thoughts of my imagination. As I lay there getting warm and comfortable, I would catch one of his ideas and my mind would float off in exploration of it. Before I knew what was happening, I had been asleep for a long time and my alarm was signaling the morning.
Of course, if the problem is not your mind but your body, these ideas might not help. Then again, they might. You never know until you try.
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