It's No Time To Sleep

It's No Time To Sleep

     In the early morning while the world is sleeping I awake. No not by choice but yet by choice. It's 1:30 a.m. Yes I could roll over and go back to sleep as my body desires to do but again my thoughts roll over and over in my head and sleep eludes me. I am consumed with a burden for souls. I realize that some people who read this may think I am crazy or at least a little off but not so, this is what a burden feels like. Tears roll down my cheeks as I cry out for a world that is lost and more real to me, for our children and grandchildren. I am reminded once again of the verse in Luke 23:28  where Jesus told them. Daughters of Jerusalem weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. Who will pray in this day when things are so hurried and the world says things don't matter. That it is ok to live like you want and dress just any old way. When they call good evil and evil good. I want to shout to the top of my lungs. People of God wake up! Pray! Arise in the early morning and late at night. Bow on your knees at noon time and early afternoon. Wherever you are whatever you are doing stop and cry and pray for God! the one true God to look on us with compassion and love and save our world. To forgive our sin. To send back again the spirit of old time conviction. Conviction that will call us to pray once again and to arise out of our sleep because people are dying and going to hell and who will pray for them if not us, if not me. Conviction that won't let us slumber and sleep spiritually. Conviction that makes us look at ourselves through magnifying glasses and see who we really are, what we really believe. Conviction that will make us change from the comfortable to the necessary, that will wake us up in the middle of the night because our people are lost. Who, I ask will hear that call and stand in the gap and make up the hedge and do the uncomfortable to make a difference. Please God! Let it be me. Wake me up tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next night, and help me to pray, to weep, to cry for souls...That is what he did in the garden of   Gethsemane and that is what our calling is. Thank you God for choosing me, for trusting me with this gift. Help me ever be found on my knees before you until my world is saved.

    

A Soldiers Heart

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."