Creative Ways: Sleepless Musings

A short meditation on finding peace in the night.

Wide awake again, one of those nights when a pounding heart and sense of mild panic descends. Just wait a few seconds then breathe it through, slowly, surely, the quietness eventually settles again. The night seems like a long minute by minute wait for the morning.

Last night as I lay awake attempting to unravel my tangled thinking a picture came to mind. Stitches on a piece of cloth, a little wobbly and knotted in places, a bit directionless perhaps, no clear method or purpose. I just knew immediately that it conveyed how I was feeling. This current season of life has begun to feel foggy and difficult. The creative ‘well’ in me has felt empty and lacking. A little ‘wobbly’ is an apt description of how I’m navigating life...

But in the dark last night I felt God was saying something to me, offering a thread of a thought to follow.

So I followed.

Firstly I suddenly knew that He knew how I was feeling. I wasn’t alone on all those nights with a pounding heart and panicky thoughts. He was reminding me that he’s still, and always will be, with me.

Secondly he was suggesting something fresh. In a fog you can easily lose direction and in foggy times it seems impossible to make any decisions about life. I felt him say that we could together pick up the threads and gently unpick them where there was a knot, we could decide to untangle a stitch, to see more clearly where we were - we could go back to the moment when things got complicated or the stitching lost it’s direction.

And thirdly and most surprisingly he was saying that we could start off again together, creating again a piece of worth and beauty. Even in a season of difficulty and uncertainty, even in the fog, together we could move forwards and make a beautiful thing, a hopeful thing. A new thing.

Stitch by stitch I watched in my mind’s eye the tangly threads begin to form a simple but purposeful line, not perfect but visible, and with an intention to them. I felt the stirrings of hope. When a prolonged season of difficulties draw us into a pattern of negative thinking we desperately need the light that hope can bring. Hope is the antidote to that downward spiral of negativity, it can alter the way we think. And with hope in us, we can hear the voice of the Spirit saying ‘Yes’ over our lives.

When the night is long, and I am awake in the darkness, I know the tangled threads of my life are not the end of the story. I am reminded that this season I am in is not a ‘write off’ but instead the Spirit is at work within me, writing his story over my life. I hear the voice of the Spirit saying seven simple words as I fall back to sleep.

See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.

Isaiah 43

Contributor: J. Reeves