My soul yearns for You in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks You…” -Isaiah 26:9 ESV

Caught! There I was, at 4 AM, perched in front of my computer, in flannel nightgown and pink terry robe, earphones on, singing along with Fernando Ortega, in what I thought was a muffled undertone, when my eye caught a movement beside me.

My husband! “Did I wake you up!?” I exclaimed. At least he was grinning, not scowling.

Good for Laughs

I do provide him a lot of amusement. Even at wee small hours. But I hadn’t meant to wake him. He’s supposed to be hard of hearing, and the bedroom’s on the other end of the hallway; its door was closed.

He just grinned wider and said something like, “That’s okay. Doesn’t everybody get up in the middle of the night and sing? I’m just going to close the door, if that’s all right.”

And so he went back to bed, my profuse apologies trailing behind him, along with “No, no, I won’t sing out loud anymore.”

Songs in the Head, in the Night

Of course I wouldn’t. It was embarrassing. You know how you sound when you have earphones on and think you’re matching the melody? But I did listen again as I read the lyrics (silently!)—because they so expressed my heart.

I had awakened a half-hour before with them running through my head: “I look for You in the middle of the night, Savior and Guardian of my soul…”—and finally got up to hear them and refresh my memory as to how they went. I thought I might want to sing them through the day.

Well, I ended up singing them in the night, worshiping there at my computer-altar, lifting up my heart to God in (dubious) melody. Till I interrupted someone’s sleep, and he then interrupted my “joyful noise.”

It wasn’t much longer before I heard footsteps descending the stairs, and soon smelled (good!) coffee brewing. So I went down, laptop tucked under arm, to share with a fully-dressed hubby what I’d been listening to.

“Oh yes,” he said, listening and reading lyrics. “I like that song.”

Wacky-wise

I settled at the kitchen table with a nice hot aromatic cup and he shuffled off to the library to go over some of his Bible memory verses. I could hear him mumbling them off his stack of index cards as I savored my java and thought how I’d influenced him. He never used to “mutter to himself,” but after all those years married to a mumbler, he finally caught the disease himself.

The “muttering” paused. He reappeared in the kitchen doorway with a single index card in hand.

“See. I understand my wacky wife,” he said, and laid the card on the table in front of me.

It was Isaiah 26:9 ESV.

“My soul yearns for You in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks You…”