“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” Matthew 6:27 NIV
For the fifth time in an hour, I leaned over my newborn daughter’s bassinet and checked to make sure she was okay. Thoughts of SIDS and fears of her getting tangled in her blanket filled my head. I held my breath and watched her tiny chest rise and fall. Only after I was sure she was okay did I lie back down and try to get some sleep.
Those first few nights of motherhood—months, actually—were like that. When my daughter didn’t wake me up because she was hungry, I woke myself up to make sure she was okay.
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A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you’re fast asleep
In dreams you lose your heartaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep
Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling thru
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
the dream that you wish will come true.
When I was a child, I loved to make wishes. I made them while standing outside in the dark, standing on the grass in my bare feet, gazing upon the stars. I made them in pretty party dresses surrounded by friends and family as I puckered up and blew out the candles on the cake.
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It’s not light yet. I see a glow from the almost full moon and rays of artificial street light from behind the trees. But it is dark. Everyone still sleeps, at least in my house.
The clock shines red numbers on the ceiling — a four and a three and a zero. He’s done it again. For the 4th or 5th time in a row. Awake at exactly 4:30am. Sometimes even a few minutes earlier. He wants me to have an hour with Him before I start my day.
On “sleep-in days”, He gets me up at 5:30.
Sometimes it’s a husband getting up to use the bathroom that wakes me.
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This summer my family and I went on quite the adventurous excursion. In twelve days, we drove 4,000 miles to the Wild Wild West to visit Yellowstone National Park and back home. We made lots of stops along the way to see grandparents, sisters in two states and a newborn niece. We had an all nighter stomach bug, a stolen phone and it’s happy retrieval, as well as several other mishaps along the way. To say we were happy to sleep in our own bed when we finally got home is an understatement.
My kids are nine and eleven years old and it’s sad to say, but we had not spent that kind of time together since our last vacation.
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Love is patient, love is kind. 1 Corinthians 13:4
“Lord, please strike him with a holy bolt of lightning,” I prayed. “No real damage. Just enough to scorch him a little.”
Okay, so I don’t normally pray for my husband’s ruin, but let me explain what happened.
It was a Friday night when Grace was still four months old. I heard her in the monitor and tapped my husband, mumbling something like, “Grshisup.” He stumbled from the bed and down the hall. I followed to make him a bottle and then flopped back in bed. Minutes later, my sleep bubble burst when Alan stomped in our room.
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Blessings have always seemed to be the symbol of the favor of God, of being in His will. And when they’ve rained down upon my head, I have to say that I have felt incredibly loved by God.
Not that I deserved the blessings – never, ever will that be the case. But maybe I felt that, by receiving them, I’d reached some sort of apex. A finish line, of sorts.
That’s how I used to think. Now I know differently.
Blessings are not what bring fulfillment to this life. If you don’t believe this, think back over the blessings in your life.
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The slide, thump, slide, thump of my imagination raced in time with my heart as ordinary shadows of my dresser, lamp, and bedpost turned into monsters ambling closer to surround me. While I held a feeble shield of covers drawn taunt around my body, I closed my eyes in my last defense against the things that lurked beyond. Midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock and on, my fear of these quiet hours turned my room into something that it was not. Thankfully, when the morning came all my fears were forgotten in the light. But when night came again, the cycle repeated, and I trembled in fear at the monsters in my closet.
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It was pitch black outside. So dark that you couldn’t see in front of you. My friends and I wandered across the boardwalk, leaving the light of the pool area, and meandered onto the sand leading down to the ocean. Sand, that during the day is a brilliant white; yet now, we couldn’t see anything except the shadows of the waves pounding ashore.
We kept walking forward. Across the dunes and down to the packed sand edging the South Carolina beach. The stars shone brilliantly in the darkened sky — each one more vivid and brighter than I’ve seen stars before.
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