When the moon rides high and the streets are quiet but my heart isn’t, I discover the graceful purpose in sleepless nights.

Sleepless nights are for reaching the end of control. Again. For knowing that if I don’t sleep now, the essentials of tomorrow will be impossible.  For finding it impossible to force sleep and readjusting my perception of essential.

Sleepless nights are for ceasing the struggle. For letting my weary body sink into the soft mattress and my weary soul into arms that are waiting beneath. For finding them strong and sure.

They’re for whispering words in the stillness, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” For hearing the grace-gift spoken to me, over me. “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” For seeing again that “hands that should discard me hold wounds which tell me come.” (Keith and Kristen Getty, “Beneath the cross of Jesus.”).

These shortest of long hours are for receiving the grace that reminds me that all is given free. There is nothing to prove, no way to earn a love deeper than that I’m already given. That, really, life is more about these arms that hold me than about what I can or can’t do in the morning.

They’re for soaking in the quietness offered. Letting assurance settle deep.

They’re a gift. A gift of space to be filled not with doing, nor even thinking, but merely being. Being loved. Being together.  Hours filled with the being of the One who is, the One who welcomes each into his very being.