Guest blogger ... Shannon Woodward

Pearl Girl: Shannon Woodward

I am a Calvary Chapel pastor's wife, editor, speaker, and the author or co-writer of nine books, including A Whisper in Winter: Stories of Hearing God's Voice in Every Season of Life (New Hope Publ.) and Inconceivable: Finding Peace in the Midst of Infertility (Cook Communications). My monthly column can be found at Christian Women Online.

Late Night Meetings

Pearl of Wisdom: God sees your circumstance and will rise to your defense.
Favorite verse: Isaiah 59:19 “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.”


A few years back, I went through a period of insomnia. Too frequently, I'd jolt awake thinking, Not again. I fought it hard. I'd keep one eye closed as I navigated to the bathroom, hoping to fool the other eye into believing we were still asleep. It rarely worked. I'd stumble back to bed, resume my best falling-to-sleep position, and lie there for a frustrating hour or two.

But it occurred to me one night that maybe I wasn't waking up. Maybe I was being awakened.

"Is it You, Lord?" I asked. "Are You waking me?"

I tried to find a logical reason why God would want to interrupt my deep sleep. After rejecting "practical joke" and "health sabotage," I was left with the only reasonable conclusion: He missed me. Perhaps we hadn't had enough us-time during the day, and He waited until dark to get me alone.

I decided I'd go with that. "Lord, from now on, if I wake in the middle of the night, I'll know it's You."

He took me up on that offer.

During this time, while building a house on our property, we moved into a teeny travel trailer. It wasn't the ideal situation for middle-of-the-night rousings, but I long ago gave up arguing with God. If He wanted me to ease myself inch by slow inch across Dave's snoring body and grope around in the darkness for my robe and slippers, then so be it.

I took to keeping a square of tin foil near the dining table so I could mold it around the plastic light cover, allowing only a small, directed beam of light to leak downward and onto the pages of my Bible. Somewhere deep, I've clutched the sounds of my sleeping family, a slumbering earth, and the gathering storm of water heating in my teakettle. Collectively, all that noise created the most peaceful silence I've known.

I'd sip my cocoa and read, and listen. God never failed to speak to me in those quiet hours. Sometimes He'd speak to a specific need in my life; most nights He just told me He loved me. I learned a great deal about His heart in those late night meetings--and all the meetings since.

One night, long after we'd moved into our home, I felt that familiar nudge and rose to meet with God. But the moment I sat down--before I could even open my Bible—a favorite verse ran through my mind: When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him. --Isaiah 59:19

I felt an urgency to speak the words, so I did. Then I said it again ... and again. For an entire hour, all I could do was sit in the stillness of my living room and repeat that one truth from Scripture.

At 3:30, I stopped. Though I felt energized, I also felt so at peace that I knew I'd fall asleep as soon as I sank down into my pillow—and I did.

The next day a friend called. As our conversation progressed, she started yawning.

"Tired?" I asked, laughing.

"I haven’t been sleeping well," she said. "I keep waking up in the middle of the night."

"Me, too," I said. "In fact, I was up last night."

"I was, too," she said.

I then explained what had happened the night before. "It was the strangest thing, but I couldn’t stop repeating those words: When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him."

My friend paused, then asked, "Exactly what time were you up?"

"From 2:30 to 3:30."

The pause lengthened, and when she spoke again, I heard tears in her voice. "God had you up praying for me." She had awakened at 2:00 with a heart so heavy it drove her to the bathroom floor, where she lay sobbing. She said that life felt too hard; hope seemed too distant. She felt overwhelmed, she said, by a flood of worry and despair. Until suddenly, at 3:30, the darkness fled, the heaviness lifted and she felt awash in peace. And at the same moment that I rose from my couch and returned to my pillow, my friend rose from the floor and returned to hers.

I am often completely taken aback by the knowledge that the God who dreamed up gravity and love, who thought to put spots on a giraffe and devotion in the heart of a puppy, who named and then scattered the stars in the sky, would watch me sleep ... and wake me to meet Him ... and invite me to put my two hands next to His on the plow.

posted by Margaret McSweeney @ 4:39 AM