Amazing Grace

Six Little Ducks, Wee Willie Winkie, All the Pretty Little Horses.

Of all the lullabyes I have sung over the years, and there have been many, I am quite pleased that Holly's favorite song isn't a lullabye at all. It's Amazing Grace. I can remember with my first child singing "Six Little Ducks" until my brain began to turn to mush! Or with my second singing "All the Pretty Little Horse" until I saw horses in the few moments of sleep I did get.

But this is a different kind of midnight experience. "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." Somehow, these words, this tune, captures Holly attention and she will pretty quickly fall asleep. What an unexpected gift God has given me. The thing my daughter needs the most is a song about Grace. The very thing I need the most.

Midnight meditations on Amazing Grace have lifted me up, out of the sleep-deprived nonsense of nursery rhymes into another place. I am counting on God's Grace to carry us through the next few years of surgery and treatments that I can't comprehend. So I am counting these nights, singing about God's Grace, as treasure in heaven for the nights ahead. Those nights after Holly's first surgery, when I don't know what I will be able to think about.

I hope this Grace will cover me, today when I am talking to my husband and older children and in the future when Holly is recovering. What a great "auto-pilot" prayer to have ahead of me: "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining like the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise then when we've just begun."