Bolstered by a banana and Luther's lyrics

In the last several weeks I’ve learned to sleep with a banana beside my bed. They say insomnia comes as a normal part of the pregnancy package, and mine is generally motivated by hunger. Our little baby, once so proportionally small the doctors worried, keeps growing and growing. Because of this, I get hungrier by the day—and night. I sometimes feel there is not enough food in the world for me to eat.

But this week my wakefulness had a double motive: hunger and anxiety. Late-night worries whirled through my mind—not my worries, but worries belonging to dear friends in the thick of spiritual battle. In a way, their troubles do belong to me, of course, in the way the agony caused by a few crushed fingers plagues the entire body. Do you ever wake up like that? When times like these come I don’t know how to pray. I feel like I’m approaching God through a crackling telephone line, thinking He does not hear me because I don’t know what to say.

So for several minutes I lay there mute and bothered, my heart breaking with the pain of people trapped in the onslaught of Satan-engineered evil. Then slowly, for whatever reason, the ageless words of Martin Luther’s well-known hymn began rolling through my mind: “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.”

My husband, when we were dating, laughed through this song during college chapel because every time he heard it he imagined someone falling downstairs to the melody’s plunking descent. I couldn’t blame him. But on this night my mind bore down on the old words, cracking them like walnuts, coveting their fruit. I wrapped my broken self in an old century, breaking the hymn’s phrases apart and rewriting them in my own words to make sure my heart really understood them:

“Our God is a castle of protection with unlimited strength. A defensive wall without a single chink in it. This God is our helper, triumphing over our human sin-sicknesses every time without exception. For our old enemy, Satan, still seeks to ravage and destroy us with lies. Outfitted with hatred for us, he is shrewder than anyone on Earth.”

You of course can’t stop “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” with the first verse and the supremacy of the devil. When I arrived at the second verse, I felt my hard and frightened heart change in the way butter might melt in the sun:

“If we trusted in our own strength, all our work would be for nothing. But the man God chose stands on our side of the battle lines and will never move. Do you know who He is? He is Christ Jesus, commander of an angelic host, winner of every fight.”

God truly gave Luther “the tongue of those who are taught” so that he “may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary” (Isaiah 50:4). How powerful evil looked to me before I started to mull over his words! But afterward, I did not tremble at the Prince of Darkness grim. I ate my banana, rolled over, and fell asleep.