Too Excited to Sleep!

You know what I mean.  Christmas Eve?  Seriously!  Who can sleep on Christmas Eve?  I remember how my mom always told me that Santa would not come unless I was asleep, but it was such an epic battle between the overwhelming excitement about his coming and the nagging fear that he just might not come because I couldn’t help listening for his coming!  Oh, the agony mixed with ecstasy!

I eventually learned that this feeling is not unique to Christmas or to young children, as excitement/anxiety has robbed me of quite a few winks throughout my life.  Be it the first day of school, a speech, a recital, a huge test, a graduation, a wedding — sometimes what lies ahead of me is just too thrilling to waste my time by sleeping!

Last night was just such a night.  You see, this is not my first rodeo.  (And by rodeo, I hope you know I mean blog.)  In fact, blogging and I met about two years ago.  Unfortunately, I name-dropped my blog like I was trying to work my way up the proverbial blogospheric ladder, (Is that proverbial?  If not, I just made it so.  You’re welcome.), and I eventually just couldn’t be “me” anymore — at least, not deeply “me.”  Too many different kinds of people from different parts of my life knew about it, and I had to filter my heart so much that my blog and I just grew apart.  I found myself in this dire blog-crisis, trying to decide between three options:

1. Telling everyone to just go to hell; I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say, so get over it.
2. Realizing I can’t sacrifice my responsibility to edify others in the name of my personal, emotional, creative needs; I’m just gonna delete my blog entirely.
3. Realizing that both of the above options are ridiculous; I’m gonna start a new blog where no one knows who I really am.  I can keep the old one for less personal topics.

Despite all the voices in my head telling me that it will take too much time, one blog was more than I could handle before, I’ll never get any readers on the new one, if it’s not nice enough for everyone to hear, then maybe I should keep it to myself anyway, etc., I finally just decided to start one.  And here I am!

Reader, I agonized over this for months.  MONTHS! It’s just a tiny blog.  Who cares if it fails?  No one knows me anyway!  Being the overly analytical person that I am, however, I just kept coming up with reasons why this was a bad idea.  Unfortunately, that led me right back to square one: I have too much to say and too much to feel, and writing is how I work it all out.  Journaling is not enough; I need impartial — yet Christian — people to respond and tell me when I’m being stupid or just plain disobedient.  I need you.

Back to last night.  I set up my new little blog, (isn’t it cute?  I love pink!), made a couple little pages, (not sure how I feel about all of them yet; what do you think?), and wrote my introductory post (wasn’t much; doesn’t need to be).  It being 1 a.m. by this point, I decided it was time to join my husband in sleepy-town and leave the rest for later.  I crawled into bed, prayed for my sweet husband, and then stared at the ceiling.  My heart was pounding.  My mind was racing.  The floodgates of blog post ideas had opened, and I was trying desperately not to drown.

“Calm down!  Go to sleep!  Think about it tomorrow!” I scolded myself.

“What? Tomorrow?” I argued.  “If you wait until tomorrow, you will have forgotten!  Get up!  Go write!”

“NO!  Shh!  It’s bedtime!”

“SCREW bedtime! You have so much to say!  You need to write a post for David.  And you have stuff to say to Mattie that you can really only write.  And you can finally risk being shunned by your church by saying–”

“OKAY!  Compromise!”

(What?  You don’t argue with yourself?  Weird.)

I knew it would be ridiculous to stay up all night writing posts, so I wrote down all my ideas on the little pad of paper I keep by the bed for just such maddening occasions.  As I scribbled, I quickly glanced over at David to make sure I wasn’t disturbing him; my pencil was so loud!  Deafening, really!  Thankfully, he didn’t hear it, and I successfully quieted my mind for sleep.  Happy, sweet sleep.

And I woke up in a more joyful spirit than I have in a long time.  I finally listened to the right voice.

~LG