Wednesday,
April 26, 2023
Oh, praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, you
who serve at night in the house of the Lord. Lift your hands toward the sanctuary, and
praise the Lord. May the Lord,
who made heaven and earth, bless you from Jerusalem. Psalm 134:1-3
You might be one of
those dear folk who works the night shift.
I have to admire your ability to deal with the odd hours, and a schedule
that’s upside down from the rest of the world.
When I was very young my dad worked the night shift at an aircraft
factory. He was just getting home when
we got up. He’d sleep while we were at
school, and had already left for work by the time we got back home. When my children were very young I had a
brush with the night shift. It was 1980,
when Elizabeth and I packed all our stuff into a U-Haul and moved 600 miles to
New Orleans to attend seminary. We
didn’t have a clue where we’d live, or how we would feed and clothe our three
kids. It was a leap of faith, and God
took care of it all. The first job I had
was working the night shift as a security guard. It gave me quiet and time to study. The job lasted two days before I realized
falling asleep in the following day’s classes was not going to work well.
There is another
kind of night shift which almost every Christian I’ve
known has labored. It’s that time in the
dead of night when you should be asleep, but:
·
that loved family member’s health is failing
·
your job isn’t going well
·
the month has lasted a lot longer than the money in your bank
account
·
your child is (fill in that blank).
God never lived in the
sanctuary…that is the place we meet Him.
And, in those particularly difficult times when life is uncertain, hard,
and sometimes downright scary, we work night shift in His arms. We pray, and we pray hard. Sometimes we drift off in the middle of prayers
as God gives His beloved rest.[1]
Sometimes God
directs us to work the night shift. As
Jesus was “driven” to the wilderness to fast and pray after his baptism[2], we are compelled towards prayer in the crisis moments
of life.
As a pastor I’ve
seen the night shift look on more than a few drained faces. Sometimes the results of night shift
intercession for God’s move are seen in a church Sunday morning nap in the pew
during a too-long sermon.
It’s the night
shift…part human condition, part divine intervention. We must pay attention to life during the
night shift.
For You Today
One of my night shift
prayers for you today is what the Psalmist prayed:
May the Lord,
who made heaven and earth, bless you from Jerusalem.
There are about 2,500 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions
library. To dig deeper explore
some of these: Why Doesn't God Answer My
Prayers? and Bi-Polar Prayers
Title Image: via
Pixabay.com Images without citation are in
public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted
from The New Living Translation©
