In Bed by 9??

Yesterday I went to the temple and so many things happened! On the way there/back we listened to Hank Smith talks and in one I felt prompted to deepen my commitment to going to bed at 9 pm. Like super deep. He has a talk about building a foundation in which he references "The Great Divorce" where C.S. Lewis compares our sins to red lizards on our shoulders that claw in deep whenever Christ tries to heal us. The discipline to go to sleep has been something I have felt prompted for a while to work on.

Last night I was trying to finish up the level of Hungarian I was working on and it was nearing 9 pm. I had read to Spooner and snuggled with him, Liliputian had helped Zsa-man go to sleep while rubbing his legs and I had rocked Liesl to sleep while reading the last chapter of the "Castle of Wizardry" aloud. PIpalicious and Chugger-dude had attacked the kitchen in the meanwhile and it shone. The older kids had started a movie and I was sitting in the room "multi-tasking" (doing neither thing well, lol :D!) watching the movie and finishing up my level on Duolingo.

9 pm hit and my bed wasn't even made up yet. I stopped what I was doing, just got my bed out, and went straight to bed. The movie was still going but I focused on relaxing and ignoring it and somehow went to sleep in a few minutes (too little sleep the night before helps!). When I woke up this morning feeling calm and refreshed, I realized that an additional blessing of going to sleep like that is that it shows trust and faith that the time that the Lord has allotted me is enough to do what is needful. I have a built in lie that if only I tried a little harder, the truly HUGE list of possible to-dos (all of which are awesome and nurturing and amazing) would just be done. The peace I felt this morning, the trust, that if God told me to go to sleep at 9 then I could trust Him to do so was pretty special.