The Lord meets with me in that fuzzy place between awake and asleep.
It doesn’t happen every day, or every week for that matter, but it has happened enough that I know He likes to meet me then, and when I feel like I hear His voice, I can go from half snoozing to wide awake pretty quickly.
This morning, it happened…..but first, a sentence or two of background. With a large family there are always a lot of personal needs, simply because there are a lot of persons. Each child is unique, and with them stretched from 21 to 2 in age, the needs are widely varied. It’s possible to get so sucked into focusing on the needs of one that the immediate needs of the other gets pushed aside in a parent’s mind for a moment, and when they all come racing back to your memory, it can be overwhelming.
In those half-wake moments, as I heard my children start to stir in the house, I heard the Lord. It was not an audible voice, but it was resonant. The voice made no sound, but somehow it echoed.
He said “There is grace to ask today.”
The words “grace” and “ask” seemed to have been vocalized in bold, italicized and underlined. Immediately I started to pray, going down the line of each member of my family, interceding for the specific challenges that they are facing. It had energy and life on it…I went through the list several times from every angle I could, but bolder each time.
I don’t think this is just for me. There is grace for you to ask today as well. Maybe your asking, your seeking and your knocking have grown weaker over the months. The burdens have felt overwhelming and at times it felt like it would be easier to just sit down for a while.
There is grace to ask today, and today is all we have. Ask with great expectation. He is eager to hear from you.
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Randy and Kelsey Bohlender have been married for 25 years. They have nine children ranging from 21 to 2 years in age. Five are adopted, including two sets of twins. Randy and Kelsey have served as staff pastors, church planters, and ministry leaders with churches from 60 to 6,000. They have also been called ‘serial starters”, having launched a church, a house of prayer, an adoption funding non-profit, an adoption agency, and a k-12 private school.Kelsey is a student at Regent University, majoring in Government and Foreign Policy. She is accomplished speaker, vibrant mother, and makes a pretty mean batch of homemade granola. Randy grew up in rural North Dakota and is adjusting to the outside world. He enjoys things that make noise and go fast. He blogs and podcasts about leadership and family life at RandyBohlender.com. You can find them on twitter @rbohlender @kbohlender.
