A Soldiers Heart
At 3:30 a.m. I got the call. It woke me up out of a dead sleep. At first my thoughts were fuzzy and I did not quite comprehend what was going on. My husband lay asleep beside me and I could hear the steady rhythmic sound of his breath as he slept. Awake now I gathered my thoughts. At first I thought I would just go back to sleep all the while knowing that was not going to happen. Yes I could have shrugged it off and drifted back into the welcome warmness and comfort of that place before dawn when you sleep the best but I knew I was being called to do something else. I quietly slipped out of bed. I headed for the living room to the corner of the sofa where I pray these days. I would love to kneel but must sit due to aching knees from years of work and misuse. I sat quietly in the dark with only the warm glow from an antique lamp and the aquarium. I thought about the time that God spoke to Samuel as a child and how at first he did not recognize the voice. The voice that would soon seem all to familiar. It is that voice that I hear now... No not audible but just as clear. I knew that I was being called to pray, for what I did not know. I just wait and listen and quietly utter words of thankfulness and praise and slowly, deliberately I am drawn into a place of deep things where battles are fought and won. I pray for souls and soon feel the deep groaning of the spirit. The groaning of travail. The same kind of groaning felt when babies are being born as the pain absorbs the whole body and leaves one to exhausted to move. I cherish this place because I realize that even though it is painful it is important to the kingdom of God. After a while my agony turns to tears and I feel that spirit wash over me cleansing me and I know that I have touched the very throne of God. I have heard it said that prayers never go away but instead roll over and over and are forever continual throughout eternity, that they ever remain before God reminding him of our every need, of souls who are important to us. I know that every soul is important even the ones we may not have a name for. That is why it is important to care...To cry out for the ones who we don't even know. To pray for the beggar on the street and the drug addict who is lost in the hopelessness of addiction. To pray for the children with no one to love them and the grandmother who has been left alone. You see...We don't have to know them but we know they exist and need us to stand in the gap for them that they might be saved. That is why we are here. To win them. To fight battles for them that they will never even know about until one day in heaven when all will be revealed. So God use me. Wake me up at three a.m. Help me to never love sleep so much that I don't listen and shun the very thing that I have been called to do. Help me to fight this battle as the war rages on. Give us I pray souls by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Let my vision be greater than the simple things that I see. Give me I pray a soldiers heart.
1 Samuel 3:8
"and Eli perceived that the Lord had called the child."
