Voices In The Night

Woke out of a sound sleep at 1:08 am and then again at 2:15 am.  What is it that jolts my mind into consciousness and moves me immediately to prayer?  

Same thing happened last night, too, and the theme of those prayers was begging God for wisdom to find the right yard sales to buy stuffed animals.  He answered those prayers with a haul of 353 of them.  That means over the past two weekends alone He's provided 777--a perfect number.

As I unloaded the car after the sales, Jim informed me that his sister and her significant other are coming to stay with us for a few days this week.  Yikes!  Where am I going to hide all this stuff?  Not enough space to stash all the blessings.  

And should I drive to Hagerstown, MD to pick up white shoe boxes?

I think of these questions in the night and then I turn my voice back to prayer.  I remember leafing through the book of Joshua in my Bible a few days ago and seeing in chapter 10 how God made the sun stand still when Joshua prayed.  Verse 13 says, "And there was no day like that before it or after it, when the Lord listened to the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel."  Oh to be heard like that.

God, when you wake me in the night I'm not asking for the sun to stand still, but I am asking You to listen to my voice.  I'm asking You to work out the myriad of details and provide 10,000 shoe boxes this year--and the stuff to fill them and the volunteers to pack them.  

And I'm asking for 18,000 boxes from our Northwestern PA area and 600,000 boxes from the Mid-Atlantic region and 5.2 million boxes nationwide.

Because there are children's voices calling in the night--children who need to know You love them.