It is dark and mostly quiet in my house tonight as I sit down once again with my computer. What I should be doing is sleeping....like my hubby who is serenading me from the bedroom with his nightly tune. However, once again I am awake...way before morning and time for my friendly alarm to blare it's reminder to wake up! Why do I keep waking up? Why can I not sleep? Trust me, I am tired. Very tired. Even now my eyes want to close but my body won't let them because I am far from comfortable.
My routine almost nightly is to wake up at or around 3 am and make my way to the living room where I sit in my "spot" now on my new recliner/loveseat. Then I would stretch out and doze back off for a couple more hours. Tonight is different. I made my way to my seat as normal and then when I tried to lay back, my new-to-me electric recliner loveseat would not recline. UGH! I sat there for a little bit, frustrated and thinking if I waited a couple of minutes and tried again, it would work. NOPE! Then I decided the connection must have come loose, so I pulled the extremely heavy thing away from the wall enough for me to lay down behind it and with my handy-dandy flashlight on my phone, I crawled back there and started looking at wires. NOPE! They were connected. Everything was as it should be as far as I could tell. So I thought I would try again to sit in my spot and surely now it would open the recliner. NOPE AGAIN!
Frustration wanted to set in. THAT'S MY SPOT! I kept thinking...and WHY would MY SPOT decide to not work. I'm careful with my recliner. I take care of my stuff and I had just warned/played around/teased a few others in our house to NOT tear up my electric recliners. This is not a funny joke. I started thinking about my daughter, who had been sitting in my spot earlier tonight and instantly I started blaming her. What did she do to my chair? I'm still hoping it is no big deal and that something is just loose. Hoping my NEWLY paid for new-to-me furniture is not already broken. Hoping I don't have to sit in a different seat now....like I am this morning as I type. I have taken over my hubby's SPOT!
So why am I constantly having these sleepless nights? That really is the problem, not my broken chair. I am tired. We are on the go all the time and today while riding back from Waco with my family, I could not keep my eyes open! I felt even drugged I was so out of it. I am obviously tired...but not sleeping.
I believe it is probably a combination of things. Work....family....money....house not being in order....taxes need to be done.....worry....excitement....frustration....my list could continue on and on. There seems to be a lot lately going on in my head. So much so that I can not keep it all sorted out. So much so that I find myself slipping in to that dark spot from time to time. That place of sadness and loneliness and despair. That place I fight so often to stay out of.
Even as a little girl, I didn't like the dark. I would lay in my bed and NOT MOVE if I woke up in the night. I was afraid of everything around me and my bed was my safe haven. If I could just lay still long enough then maybe I would go back to sleep and nothing would get me in the dark. However, now....the dark doesn't hold that fear for me. Nighttime is still ominous at times, but most nights I just find peace in the calm of the dark. I can hear myself think at night. I can hear the sounds of nature outside when the hoot owl decides to sing. I hear every little daily, soft noise that is covered up during the day time by the noise of life. But the thing that I find I hear better in the dark.....is a quiet voice.
I don't know how you hear God or how you feel His presence in your life, but for me, it is a quiet voice in my spirit. One that prompts me to write and express. Sometimes that voice gets very loud in my head until I get to the point I have to write or never sleep again. I never am sure at what message it is suppose to bring or give or inspire for others. I just know I am to write. To express and to follow the prompting of this soft voice. And so tonight, while I was frustrated about my chair not working and frustrated over once again not sleeping, I followed the prompt and picked up my computer....to write.
I am hoping these sleepless nights don't continue. New mattresses haven't seemed to help me with this problem yet. Getting up early and going to bed at a decent time haven't helped yet either. I could go take some medicine to help me sleep, to calm my mind and relax my body. I am tempted to do that even now, just so I can sleep, but instead I feel the need to just get some of this stuff out of my head.
So what is it? What is worrying me or playing ping-pong in my head? Life. Just life. Hurting friends, injustice, happinesses, excitements, dread of things to come, fears, pains, love, longing, illnesses, test results, all of the above. My feelers are on full blast lately. I feel everything around me 10 times more than normal. I am so sensitive to everyone's feelings around me. It is almost too much. During the day hours it seems to consume so much of my time that it is hard for me to want to give any of my evenings to it. But I am finding, more and more each day, that God's voice is easiest heard in the quiet calm of the dark. God meets us in the dark places. Dark places physically and dark places spiritually. He finds us where we are and reasches out to us in a whisper.
So as my eyes get heavy once again and I prepare to lay this computer down.....I wonder what purpose He has for my sleepless night tonight. I have used it to write instead of wander through the pages of facebook or playing games. I didn't pin anything new tonight. I just listened and followed by responding and writing.....as He has so often prompted me to do. Being a night processor is not easy and means many more sleeepless nights ahead for me, but if I am spending them getting closer again to my God, then every lost moment of sleep will be worth it.
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