It seems to us that tiredness through lack of sleep is one of the weapons Satan tries to use to keep God's 'harvesters' functioning on 'less capacity'. We know in our own situation how much of a positive difference a good eight hours sleep can do, and how much night after night of irregular broken sleep can wear us down......
But this last month the 'variety' of sleep stealing events has been quite incredible - some of which are very unique to living where we live.
Yes we are in Africa but these sleep breakers are not Lions roaring or drums beating, they are the 'edge of the city' urban African kind........
I thought you might be interested to read a little bit more about what makes up our daily lives....or our daily nights and their interruptions!
- neighbourhood DOGS barking - at other stray dogs, maybe at possible intruders wandering the streets, or just talking to each other across the suburbs! (real life Lady and the Tramp!)
- but we have had a few nights where all the neighbourhood dogs were barking because of COWS wandering the streets with their bells going 'ding, ding' as they move along
- POWER SURGES that turn on our touch lamps in the middle of the night - sometimes several times a night - so now we unplug the lamps!
- SECURITY ALARMS in neighbouring houses going off either for legitimate reasons of intruders or residents coming home late and triggering the alarm or leaving windows open on very windy evenings that trigger alarms
- while we live in a relatively quiet neighbourhood normally, periodically our neighbours have a party or guests over and decide to take their hi-fi systems out into their yard and put the MUSIC AT FULL VOLUME, or their friends will pull up in a car with a powerful stereo system, open all the doors and turn it up to full volume so that they can hear it inside the house! Thankfully this has mostly stopped on the stroke of mid-night - as is the law here - but not always.
- although its not a late night thing, some nights we have had a small group of BRASS BAND players over the back of our yard decide that their jam session should start at 8pm and they always have it out in the open air of their backyard! We think they must mostly play at funerals because their repertoire is small and mostly hymns. And after years of regular 'practice' they are still trying to get right the couple of tunes that they play over and over and over!
- POWER CUTS have been an ongoing issue, and normally they occur during the day, but this last month we had one night when the power came on and off maybe 6 times during the night. That would be fine but our gate bell for some reason rings every time the power comes back on and the 'bell' part has one speaker in our dining room and one in our bedroom!....and its quite loud! and every time our dog Zac hears it, he runs to bark at someone who he thinks has come to the gate!
- in addition to this of course, we have had quite wide temperature fluctuations this winter and some nights we have actually woken up by feeling too hot under the blankets (in summer the heat is often a cause for poor sleep, and we have also managed to wake each other up on a few occasions by our SNORING.
- one night the company our CELL PHONE is with even decided to send an 'information message' at 3am that triggered a 'message' 'ding-dong' on the phone.
- this doesn't account for many times of pain from medical conditions when Andrew was having trouble with his knee and I have POTS pain episodes.
.....yes all these have happened in about the last month! I know new mums know more about lack of sleep than probably I have even known, but if there is one thing I have learnt through this once again, is how good a continuous 7-8 hours sleep can be. Sleep really is a gift of refreshment from the Lord and not a gift to be taken lightly or abused by 'burning the candle at both ends'. Our bodies need their sleep and our bodies benefit physically from sleep and we are much better prepared to deal with emotional strain and spiritual temptation when we have had good sleep.
So here's an unusual prayer request......pray for good sleep for your missionaries!
Thank you Lord for sleep!
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