Poverty and Scarcity

This week it's come to my mind more than once (okay, several times) how I used to sleep soundly through the night and sleep in (until about 7-ish) most mornings. "Used to" is the operative phrase here. But not lately. No, lately the Word has been beckoning me at the most ridiculous hours. Yesterday at 3am I just had to know what the Bible says about being sustained (see two posts down from this one). I could not wait until morning to learn what it says about the way God upholds us. And while it's not always at crazy hours, I'm still usually beckoned out of bed a little earlier than I'd like to be conscious. But it's a hunger that pulls me out from under my comfy covers, excited to encounter what the Lord has prepared for me to come across in those pages. It's like I cannot wait for the collision between my heart and the truth I know awaits me.

So as I've kept thinking these past few days about the sleep I've lost, a passage from Proverbs ran through my mind. I knew it word for word but didn't know the reference--and that's the cool thing about being in the Word--it was just one of those verses I've read enough times that it was being embedded deeper into me each time I did, even though it's never jumped out at me until now. Well, after a bit of searching, I found the words in Proverbs 24. Verses 33 and 34 say:

"A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come on you like a bandit, and scarcity like an armed man."

To me, this has always meant that a lazy man will be without. But this morning the Lord spoke to me about all the times when I did sleep through what should have been my quiet times and said,

"Those days were marked by poverty and scarcity....

Poverty of spirit. And scarcity of fruit."

Wow. I mean, wow. What a terrible shame! But I have to look at it from the flip side...So if the opposite is true now--if my life is now marked by wealth of spirit and abundance of fruit, then it seems that giving up a few zzzzz's is hardly too high a price to pay.