A Small Prayer Answered
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Faith on Wednesday, October 13, 2010 5:47 PM
Our son is not a good sleeper, and it has exhausted my husband and me.
For months we tried every trick we knew and many that we invented on the spot. We made progress, but not enough. We were exhausted from being up multiple times every night, sometimes for multiple hours.
It was manageable - with positive attitudes and taking shifts, we coped - but it was not fun.
We prayed about Blaise’s sleep daily, in a “Dear Lord, please make him sleep” way, but not in any focused way.
Then, recently, it occurred to us to pray a novena. Feeling almost silly, we chose St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes. I wondered whether it was frivolous to pray a serious novena about such a relatively small challenge, but after our first day, I felt a connection with St. Jude. I felt like he sympathized with us, could see the emotional and spiritual toll that this exhaustion was taking on us and on our marriage, and understood that although it might seem frivolous from the outside, we really did need him.
“I think he’s going to come through for us,” I told Bryan. We kept praying.
The novena ended yesterday, and as of now, Blaise has slept through the night an unprecedented four nights in a row. The week before we started the prayer, he’d been awakening three to four times per night. We’ve changed nothing in his routine since then - in fact, we’re visiting friends and he’s sleeping in a strange bed, which generally worsens sleep patterns.
I always figured (and I believe this is true) that if we waited long enough, our little guy would start sleeping on his own. Kids grow up and start sleeping. That’s how it works. But I trust that the timing of these new (beautiful) sleep patterns is not a coincidence. St. Jude came through for us. I am sure of it.
One of the parts of the prayer we did is a promise to encourage devotion to Jude. So here I am, encouraging it.
Call on him for your next need, big or small. You’ve got nothing to lose! St. Jude is truly a great saint.
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