What is it that keeps me up at 3 am?

What is it that keeps me up at 3 am?

Of course it isn’t the hour itself that awakens me but the urgency that the Holy Spirit is speaking because the information of grace can appear when he has something that cannot wait.  Many writers find themselves receiving words and thoughts of spiritual needs that should be noted when they appear.  Try as we might, if we do not jot them down when they appear we might not remember them in the hours that follow upon waking up.  

As I wrote before about a scream at 3 AM while praying to the Sacred Heart, the voice I heard after there was nothing serious due to the frightening scream, “Evil is at its greatest activity at 3 AM, the scream came for the depths of hell, and I should remember to pray for the souls in purgatory.”  I don’t know if I could have heard these elements of warnings had I been asleep, but the very fact I was awake and heard the voice of God has been a solid reminder that to keep these items deep in my cranium have never left my memory.

Listening to friends or even my own statements; we might say something told to me, regarding anything that might be important.  Guess what or who it was that injected that thought into our brain.  It isn’t always at 3 AM that we are awakened with a critical reminder of a spiritual nature that should enhance our curiosity to complete an article or help assist our preaching.  

God inspired the human authors  of the sacred books.  “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.”   (CCC 106).  

One author; Fr. Cedric Pisegna, C. P. whose many books I have read, stated that if he is awakened at night with a thought that the Holy Spirit  gets him up at night, he always keeps a pad and pen close by to record what he hears in his mind.  Without these two elements to jot down what is spoken to him he may not remember what the Spirit wants him to write about.  I have already found that if I did not write down what I was awakened to remember, in the morning I actually did not remember what he spoke to me during the night.  We cannot avoid that opportunity to put in print what the Holy Spirit is calling me to tell others what the Spirit wants them to hear.

God is not on our time-table and we must remember that with God there is no calendar or time restrictions as we understand future and past periods.  When the Spirit has something to tell us it absolutely is needed for an unknown person that we are being prepared to reach through his words but spoken through our talents of writing or speaking.

Wondering about the hour that we are nudged a little to prepare a word or two for someone else to hear us or read our words that the Holy Spirit has inspired us to extend is our mission for use.

Ralph B. Hathaway