Only then did Dianne Foster Reidy tell 54-year-old Dan Reidy that she had been repeatedly awakened by the Holy Spirit and urged to deliver a message on the House floor, where she has worked for the past eight years. …

But she’s also a person of deep faith, and she would later tell him there was no question in her mind that it was indeed the Holy Spirit rousing her night after night, even before the shutdown and the looming default.

“Waking several times a night feeling that God’s just been pressing on her to open a Bible and get into his word,” Dan Reidy says. “Reading a Bible is not foreign to us, but getting up in the middle of the night definitely is. It’s just not a part of our life.”