What keeps you awake at night?

What keeps you up at night or wakes you up and prevents you from going back to sleep?

Often the Holy Spirit wants us to pray for a specific issue in our lives or in the lives of others. It is amazing how often God wakes us up at a specific time to pray for a specific need for someone we may know. During one long hospitalization of my own, people reported on the blog that the Holy Spirit kept waking them up at 3:00am in the morning. Because those came in from around the globe, God literally raised up a 24 hour prayer covering at 3:00am in the morning.

There is another reason we may wake up.

My experience is that we can avoid issues that the Holy Spirit wants to get our attention on with our schedules and busyness. But one cannot avoid the night. When He chooses to get our attention at night, when we wake up, there is no place to hide and we face ourselves more candidly than we sometimes want to.

Most of us are very good at avoiding areas of life where we need spiritual renovation. It is not comfortable to peel away layers of our lives that we know deep down are not healthy. It is far easier to ignore areas of dishealth than to admit that they exist and that we need to deal with them. But the Holy Spirit does not let us off that easy because He wants us to be whole, healthy and spiritually alive. And one of His strategies is to gently encourage us to face ourselves - often in the middle of the night when our distractions are at a minimum - and we have nowhere to hide.

Often our busyness is a strategy to hide from issues and closets in our life that need urgent attention but we would rather not face.

Whether it is a situation we struggle with or an area of our lives that needs attention, those issues that wake us up and keep us up are areas that we need to press into with intentionality.

If it keeps you awake, pay attention. It will help you get to sleep!