Something weird happened at work on Thursday. I was running on empty with just two hours of sleep as I began my daily routine. The first person I encountered told me she hadn’t slept well the night before either and she shared a few of the reasons why.
A little later I was talking with a co-worker on my team and he said he hadn’t slept at all the night before. Another co-worker had a conversation with a friend before bedtime and she couldn’t turn her thoughts off. They continued to run laps around in her brain leaving her with the inability to fall asleep.
What the heck?!
It was my turn to lead our prayer and devotion time for our team on Thursday. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say, but then I received a text from a friend that filled me with hope and peace. I read those words for the devotion but not until after I took a poll. I asked each person in the room how they had slept Wednesday night. Six out of eight of us had not gotten ample sleep the night before and most of us didn’t know why.
The day before (Wednesday) a horrible shooting had taken place at a Kroger store in our community. It’s not a bad neighborhood. In fact, it’s a pretty safe middle-American place to live. But someone decided to end two lives in the hub of innocent people going about their day.
I wondered if that had given us all unrest even though the news is filled everyday with acts of violence, some random, some not. We’ve all become somewhat anesthetized to this occurrence, but perhaps on a subconscious level we are losing sleep due to the breakdown in society.
We took turns praying for one another that day. I listened as I waited to wrap up prayer time. These co-workers who prayed aloud could have gone on for awhile praying for the things they had agreed to pray for and adding to that list. As I listened, I thought about the thousands of other things we could each bring to the Father. I thought about the thousands of people outside those walls who had thousands of things they were praying about and thousands of things they weren’t.
And then it hit me as I continued to listen and wait my turn; each of my friends who had prayed wrapped their time up with thoughts and praise to the Father. He is our Hope and Peace.
Where else can we go? Who else can we turn to? Even though there are times that I cry out to the Father and ask Him if He sees all the senseless suffering, I always go back to Him. It seems my co-workers do as well.
Our help is in the name of the LORD, the MAKER of heaven and earth (Psalm 124:8.
Amen~
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