By day
the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a
prayer to the God of my life.
(Psalm 24:8)
What is a Night Nudge?
Right about now, you might wonder
or even scratch your head and ask, what is a night nudge? Let me say first, you
asked a deep and thought-provoking question. Second, I am most pleased to
answer your question.
You slip into your lovely,
comfy bed and drift off to sleep. Evening moves on like a quiet, slow river
with the sound of silence serenading you. A perfect, gentle end to a day
overwhelmed by tasks.
Suddenly you wake up. “What?”
“Huh?” The mist of sleep makes way to a storm of jumbled thoughts in your mind.
Once the thoughts settle down, one remains. This thought is golden. Before one
more second goes by, you dive at your light switch to enable you to see as you
grab your notebook. You learned long ago of the value of keeping a notebook by
your bedside. With great haste, you write this golden thought in your notebook
before it flees from your now awake brain.
A night nudge is like a gentle
push to encourage a writer not to lose or neglect an opportunity to put
meaningful words into the world. From my perspective, I find a night nudge more
of a friend, therefore not one to run from or ignore. I do, however, write it
down without haste.
More about night nudges
Night nudges can feed our
sense of wonder as writers. We can wonder what sets this night nudge apart from
others. Is this how God develops one’s creativity even while we sleep? If so,
then the ability to write is truly a gift. This is all part of the fun and awe
of night nudges.
There are times a night nudge
might wake us with a gentle touch and lays someone on our hearts. Perhaps, for
whatever reason, God’s still small voice is nudging us. This is a nudge never
to ignore. One where in the quiet bliss of the night we can pray for someone
loved and cared for.
Dear writers, let
us never take the silence and solitude of the night for granted. God may stir
our creative gift to bring forth words too precious to miss. Rest indeed but be
open to the gentle inspiration of a night nudge.
Alan lives in Deroche, B.C. with his wife, Terry, and their
poodle, Charlie. Alan’s byline is “Touched by grief and held by hope.” He has
been working on a work of love for three years called, “Hidden Poetic Voices: A
Reflective Work of Grief, Faith, and Poetry.” This is a work of poetry and
prose highlighting the grief of grandparents. Alan periodically writes articles
for FellowScript Magazine and the online magazine for Compassionate Friends. He
has written posts for our InScribe blog since 2015. His website, https://scarredjoy.ca, is under construction.
