In the middle of the night

From time to time I have these periods of time when I wake, become quite alertly awake, in the middle of the night. I can’t say as I like to wake up at 3 am. It is too much middle of the night to get up and too late to get up and read awhile so that I will get sleepy. (If I do that I find that by the time I get sleepy it is too late to go back to bed before work- not a good thing going off to work with only 4 hours of sleep.)

Quite often I will lie there thinking. Usually not particularly helpful thoughts. Fairly often those thoughts will turn into prayer after I have in my frustrated mind tried to solve the problem myself (in my head) for awhile.

Last night I was doing the same. I was thinking about my children and how maybe if I had done this…, or maybe if I had chosen to stay home when they were young… or maybe if I had been more… Then a new thought came to me, “I could never have been a perfect mother no matter how hard I would have worked at it. I don’t have to carry around all sorts of guilt around in my head because I made mistakes. Of course I made mistakes.”

Then it came to me that this is just one of the situations God has in his grace covered for me. He’s always known I was making mistakes and still he loved and cared for me. I can leave it with him. So there was an immediate sense of relief. The kids are really responsible now for themselves, not that I won’t love them forever and help them where I can. And of course I will continue to pray for them and sometimes worry about how they are doing. But maybe I will let go of all those useless “should haves” that pop up to keep me awake in the night.