Ch 11: Revelation by Night

The Great Comedian just loves to wake me up at night, with words or music.

One bane of my existence is my brain's tendency to go a little crazy in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wake up for no apparent reason. Stuff starts coming into my head. Not everyday stuff. Never Did I remember to check that the stove was off? kinds of thoughts. No, nothing mundane. This is creative stuff. Plans. Stories.

One night, in my twenties, I spent two or three hours planning a way for Dad to build a deck off the back of his house. Seriously. Lying there in my flannel nightgown with the pink rosebuds, I was just convinced this was a wonderful idea. It was such a wonderful idea, I never even mentioned it to him. Hours of sleep were lost, and I'm sure the next day at work was hell.

Oh, Dad did eventually build an absolutely amazing, perfectly executed deck off the back of his house. Not the original house. And it wasn’t my idea to build it. In the intervening years since my nighttime planning session, my widowed father had re-married, he and Lois had moved to her house, and she had hounded him for five (yes, 5!) years from the day he started digging the footers until the day that deck was finally completed.

Dad was a bit of a perfectionist. Guess that's where I get it from. 

In the end, his deck was better than anything I could have (or had) dreamed up, in the middle of the night or not. Over the years, since that deck-designing session, there have been plenty of times I've woken up in the wee hours, with the next big idea forcing itself upon me, refusing to be ignored.

I've learned that it’s best to just admit defeat, turn on a night light, and start writing. As author Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew says in Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir, "Ideas are temperamental; they betray you if you're not paying attention."

Her recommendation: keep a writer's journal. My recommendation: even if you aren't a writer, keep a journal of ideas. Even if it's just the Notes app on your smartphone, you won’t regret capturing those nighttime breakthroughs.

[Editor's Note: This article is Chapter 11 in my serialized spiritual memoir Well Guided: My Life as a Student at the International Academy of God, in which I share some of the many ways God has had a hand in my life. Access previous chapters via the Table of Contents.]

Salieri Got It Right

A few years after the nighttime deck debacle, while still in my twenties, it was music that crept into my brain at 2 a.m. The melody was first, and the specific instruments playing on my brain radio were a bell choir. (This was logical, since I was a member of such a choir at my church.) I let the melody expand and play, over and over, while I visualized the musical score as a short (two-page) piece that sounded sort of like a Hungarian dance.

Next, the harmony began to fill in. Finally, technique emerged. Some notes were plucked for a staccato effect. Others were undamped, to allow the notes to blend together and drift on the air. At some point, maybe 60 minutes in, or maybe 30, or maybe 90, I started thinking I should get up and write down some notes, so I wouldn't forget.

I don't possess the gift of perfect pitch. Nor did I possess a keyboard. But I did have a flute within easy reach, so, mindful of my partner, I tip-toed into the bedroom where that flute was…so I could turn on the light and make a little noise.

Somewhere, I had a mostly empty notebook from high school that was lined for music composition. I rifled through the box of flute music and pulled out the little notebook. I laid it open on my grandmother's old mahogany sewing machine cabinet, noticing once again with dismay how her nasty habit had left cigarette burns on the cabinet’s surface. I rooted around in the top drawer for a pencil.

Blowing ever so softly, I found the right notes on the flute to match what was in my head. I figured out a measure's-worth at a time, then transcribed the notes into my notebook. All I needed at that moment, in the predawn hour, was the melody. Then it was back to bed, where my now-satisfied right brain could be coaxed back to sleep.

With the help of my 1960s Artley flute, I transcribed the melody in my head.

Not long afterward I filled in the harmony, thanks to mentoring on that score (pun intended) from my bell choir director, Stanley Leonard.

I'm no Mozart, but it happened pretty much the way Salieri described in the movie Amadeus: "as if he were just taking dictation." Except for the harmony. And that lack is merely a testimony to my own limited knowledge of musical composition.

Look around, and you’ll find lots of musicians have experiences like this. And not only self-declared musicians. Author Julia Cameron didn’t think she was musical. Then Guidance told her she would write songs. And she did. Entire musicals, in fact.

Resistance is Futile

I tell you about my midnight meanderings so you'll understand that, early on, I learned to recognize that the best thing to do is to get up and get writing. So I doubt you’ll be surprised when I say that one night in early 2008, again at 2-a.m.-ish, thoughts started flowing.

I was looking at getting up early the next day to get to our convenience store for the usual back-office stuff. In other words, I couldn't afford to lie awake for hours. But my need for sleep wasn't a consideration. It never is.

Whoosh. Here it came…just a quick idea at first… but it kept elaborating, and expanding.

The main idea flooding my consciousness that night – that we all have a ministry – presented itself as an image: a small, smooth, round gray pebble dropped into a pond, making the water ripple out in concentric rings. A perfect metaphor for the way our ministry touches those closest to us first, then fans out into ever-widening circles of extended family, community, city, nation, and world.

After maybe an hour of pondering the message, I knew resistance was futile. I hadn't the first clue why God was dumping this into my brain, but that's what was happening.

And I knew The Great Author wouldn't show me all this in the middle of the night for no reason. Maybe it's for my next sermon, I thought. It wouldn't be the first time God had given me sermon material well before I needed it. Better write it down, I thought, whatever it's for.

Being Prepared

By that time, I was in my fifties, and well prepared for night-time messages. Clipboard, paper, and pencil were right at hand in the maple desk that served as my nightstand. I started writing. Not longhand. Just bullets. And a line drawing of ripples in a pond. As I finished jotting down what had already been given, more poured in. And now, pencil in hand, I didn't have to waste time reviewing the earlier parts in an attempt to remember them. I could just push forward into new material.

I wrote. And wrote. Not taking dictation like I would have in my journal. No, this was more like taking notes at a lecture. Well, not even that. More like coming home after a lecture and writing down what I remembered. And adding a little of my own interpretation, inferences, and examples along the way.

When all was said and done, and the light had been extinguished (once again), I was left with six pages of notes, asterisks, arrows, and line drawings. I had no idea what all this was for. In fact, as I fell back asleep, mischief managed, it occurred to me there was too much for one sermon. Way too much.

The purpose didn’t matter. What mattered was that I had gotten stuff down, then safely tucked it all away in that desk drawer. Some day, I trusted, I would need those notes.

Back to the Future

And now, it's 6:41 a.m., December 13, 2021. Thirteen years after writing those six middle-of-the-night pages for purposes then-as-yet unknown, here I am, having written this entire midnight-revelations story in bed, thanks to downloading a night light app to my smartphone an hour earlier.

Times have changed in the thirteen years since 2008. 

Smartphone. Apps. ReMarkable 2 electronic writing tablet and stylus, with OCR functionality and Internet connectivity (but without backlighting). I won't even have to transcribe all this into a Word document myself. Ah, yes. New technology is wonderful. 

It’s God, unchanging, who is still waking me up at night to write. 

Not that often, thankfully. I'm a bear when I haven't had at least 3 REM cycles. I'll be paying for this later today. But so worth it.

And There’s More

Wait. I thought I had finished this tale. After writing that last sentence, I re-read the draft, turned off the tablet and the night light app, then padded to the bathroom, where the light of dawn was peering through the frosted glass. And as I washed my hands, it occurred to me that I had just glimpsed God's sense of humor. 

A mere 12 hours ago, I had jumped on a Zoom call with Susan Scott for my first mentoring session. (If I was going to write this book, as directed, I needed help. And Susan is a pioneer in spiritual life writing.) Naturally, she asked about my writing practice. I allowed as how I'm a night owl, so most of my writing happens in the evening. Getting up an hour early to write just wasn't going to happen, I insisted.

Yeah. Tell that to The Great Comedian of the Universe, who just woke me up three hours early to write. Funny, God…really funny.

Work today is going to be hell. A familiar feeling, but at least now I'm working from home. I can just up my lunchtime nap allowance. 

Guess I'll be writing before bed tonight. Because, dear reader, I hear you—you still need reassurance that getting on a writing schedule, even denying yourself sleep, is actually worth it when it comes to penning spiritual memoir.

I’m here to tell you that it is.

Plus, you want to know what became of those six pages.

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