Prayers for Sleepless Nights

by Helen Reichert Lambin

While not intended as sleep aids, these prayers are designed to help readers make use of wakeful hours and form a relationship with God during those long nights when sleep just won't come. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879464054
• ISBN13: 9780879464059
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: ACTA Publications
• Length: 79 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Constructive use for wakeful hours

Helen Reichert Lambin is a free-lance writer, mother, grandmother, and widow, who has suffered many sleepless nights. Two of her books, Grief to Grace and Death of a Husband, deal with loss. In her introduction Lambin shares her own experience of turning anxiety over wakefulness into a deepening relationship with God. The nighttime, she has discovered, is quieter and freer of distractions than daylight hours, thus sleepless nights can be put to constructive use when wrestling with small details of daily living and "the larger questions of life." Lambin encourages readers to engage God in conversation over whatever is on our minds as we lie pining for sleep. Prayers need not be formal or elegant, she writes. "God is there to receive our thoughts, words, and feelings." The work is formatted into 34 general topics such as anxieties, discouragement, nightly news, and regret. Each is treated in a two-page section consisting of a brief introduction, three or four reflections and scripture passages, and space for personal notes. In her reflection on Friends in High Places, Lambin reminds us that God is the friend who welcomes our calls anytime, day or night. She admits to wondering about the purity of prayer delivered from a comfortable bed at a time when the first choice would have been slumber. She is not wholly relaxed conducting a conversation with God as she would with friends at a sleepover. The key difference, she reminds herself, is that with God there is never any need for pretense, "since God already knows our true selves." She emphasizes this relationship with words from Psalm 139,"You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways." In a reflection titled "Plan B," the author asks God to help her find a way to deal with a bad-to-worse week that didn't turn out as she had hoped. The reading from Proverbs states, in part, "Turn to the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight." The next reflection centers on the author's tendency to "just go along" rather than plan. She prays, "Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter." The section closes with a short reflection in which Lambin asks God to help her remember that "yours is always Plan A."