In the night also my heart instructs me

​If you're like me, when bedtime comes you're ready for bed. You're ready to turn out the lights on another day, close your eyes and peacefully put the day behind you.

In many ways, though, when it comes to God, he is far from done with the day.

I was reading Psalm 16 recently and the verses I shared below caught my attention. Especially these words:

In the night also my heart instructs me.

I recently talked about how our heart has a small brain of its own. I talked about how powerfully the information and the images stored in our hearts get relayed to our brains. Thousands of years before science told us this, David was writing about it in a Psalm.

It's no surprise, really, that a God who is constantly begging us to "be still and listen," would use the still and quiet of the night to do some of his most meaningful work in us.

Just like many of you have often sat around at night patiently or not patiently waiting for your kids to fall asleep so you could work on things you needed to work on, God is also waiting for us to fall asleep so he can work on what he needs to work on.

It just so happens what he needs to work on is us.

Many nights I go to sleep thinking about something I want to write about in the morning. Many mornings I wake up with inexplicable clarity about those things I didn't have when I went to sleep. And some times, I wake up with something completely different on my mind and I'm left wondering, where did that come from.

The answer is, someone was at work while I was asleep.

Here is something important about that. It's why I think David's next line in this Psalm is so important. What we keep before us during the day, that is what God is going to use our hearts to teach us with while we sleep.

If you're reading this right now, there's a chance it's being stored in your heart and God just might use this to instruct you while you sleep tonight. Count me grateful to be a part of your dreams 😀.

What we read during the day matters.
The music we listen to during the day matters.
The television and social media we absorb matters.
The words we use and the tones we use with each other during the day matter.

All the things we keep before us during the day are the things our heart is going to use to instruct us in the night. You can think about it as planting seeds in our hearts during the day that will bloom in our brains at night.

I think in some ways that helps us be more purposeful about our day. In everything we do we can be asking, is this something I want my heart to be talking to my brain about when I got to sleep tonight?

In many ways, as you go forward with this day, you're writing your heart's lesson plans for this night.

Write beautiful plans today.