It was a dark and stormy night of the soul when a young doctor precariously stood on the precipice of despair. Nothing but nothing had turned out as he had envisioned. His relationship with his engaged sweetheart had deteriorated. With great excitement, he had opened a medical practice, and no one walked through the door. He was penniless and discouraged.
A friend mentioned that he might be interested in a random article in a recent medical journal. That evening, he began to read it. Just twelve measly pages, but enough to put him into a deep sleep. The verbose article just did not pique his interest. But something unexpected happened.
As mentioned in the book Breakthrough by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg:
"But at two o’clock in the morning he found himself awake, still clothed, still sitting in the chair by the bed, the journal still open in his lap. What had awakened him? A noise outside? A dream? No. He was awakened by the force of an idea.
"He took the small black notebook from the bedside table and scribbled twenty-five words in a barely legible, sometimes misspelled, loopy, half-awake hand. These twenty-five words scrawled at two o’clock in the morning on October 31, 1920, would eventually lead to the solution of a medical mystery that had persisted for thousands of years."
That young distraught man, Dr. Fred Banting, was not just at the end of his rope. Little did he realize in those few moments half-asleep in the middle of the night, he was on the verge of the discovery of insulin for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. Through all history, a diagnosis for type 1 was a death sentence. He pursued months of hard research in the face of skeptics and in a borrowed stifling-hot ill-equipped laboratory. In July 1921 -- one hundred years ago last month-- those twenty-five words scratched out on a scrap of paper took root. Insulin has saved the lives of millions of people. Banting, that unsuccessful, unknown, and struggling doctor was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1923.
Banting remarked in a lecture in Chicago in March 1925:
"We do not know when ideas come, but the importance of [an] idea ... cannot be overestimated. From the nature of things, ideas do not come from prosperity, affluence and contentment, but rather from the blackness of despair, not in the bright light of day, nor the footlights’ glare, but rather in the quiet, undisturbed hours of midnight, or early morning, when one can be alone to think. These are the grandest hours of all, when the progress of research, when the hewn stones of scientific fact are turned over and over, and fitted in so that the mosaic figure of truth, designed by Mother Nature long ago, be formed from the chaos."
It made me wonder about how many others ignored those wandering thoughts in the middle of the night that led to such a life-altering solution. God was trying to get someone's attention. And as seen over and over in scripture, God again used the unexpected and the unlikely to manifest His purposes.
And it made me think about what wakes me in the middle of the night. Am I thinking? Am I just worrying? Is God trying to nudge me about what I have left undone? Am I listening to Him? When have I welcomed those wrinkles in my sleep?
Few of us will discover medical breakthroughs, but God has strategically placed us for His glory right where we are to be faithful to Him. Are we listening when seemingly unrelated pieces suddenly begin to converge? Or do we dismiss those connections as random instead of recognizing the hand of the Almighty? Or overlook the faithfulness of God breaking through?
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said,
"Surely the LORD is in this place,
and I did not know it."
Genesis 28. 16
Whatever and whenever that might be. All things are profoundly significant in obedience to Him. Far more than we realize, far beyond our lifetimes or our myopic vision.
Are we responsive to God's nudges in the quiet hours of midnight? Or just turn over and go back to sleep? How much do we miss because we are not listening?
For we are His workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand,
that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2. 10
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