Afraid Of Not Waking Up

The bulb in the lamp on the nightstand is too bright, and she has been meaning to change it for two years.

The round takes longer than it used to. Chain on the front door. Kitchen light off. Back door checked twice, though nobody here has ever tried it. The pill box on the counter with a little door for each day of the week, and she turns tomorrow's door to face out, because that is how she remembers.

Then the stairs, one at a time, hand on the rail, and the third one still creaks the way it did when the children were small enough to sneak down it.

Glass of water on the coaster her granddaughter painted. Covers turned back. The radio off, because the voices keep her up.

Eighty-one years old. She has buried a husband, two sisters, and more friends than she can count on both hands. She has been in a church pew nearly every Sunday of her life and she taught the four year olds for thirty-one of them.

And every night now, when she pulls the covers up, there is a thought sitting there waiting for her, and it has been waiting since about February.

She might not wake up.

It is not a dramatic thought. No pictures come with it. Just the plain fact of it: this could be the one, and she would not know, and the last thing she did on this earth was turn a little plastic door around so it faced the right way.

And here is the part nobody knows.

She has never said it out loud. Not to her daughter, who calls on Sundays and would go straight to worrying and start in about the spare room. Not to the pastor, who is a good man and thirty-four and would be so kind about it that it would turn into a Thing. Not to Marie at the Tuesday group, because Marie is eighty-three and has plenty of her own.

So she says goodnight to the house instead. She reaches over and turns off the too-bright lamp. And she lies there in the dark, being eighty-one and being afraid, and not one living soul knows it.

That is you, with your hand still on the switch.

Keep your eyes shut. I mean that. Everything from here can be done lying flat in the dark with nothing to look at, nothing to hold and nothing to remember, and if this is being read to you, leave it exactly as it is.

And I am going to say the plainest thing first, because you have waited long enough for somebody to say it. Being afraid of this is not unbelief. It is not a fault in your faith. You have loved the Lord since before that pastor was born. Fear turning up in a dark bedroom is not a verdict on any of that, and nobody in heaven is shaking their head at you tonight.

I am also not going to hurry you past it, and I am not going to talk you out of it. It is a real thing you are lying there with, and it deserves better than being brushed off.

Watch what the valley does to the psalm

You know this psalm. It has been said over so many caskets it has gone smooth, like a coin carried too long in a pocket.

So let us slow it down, because there is something in it put there for a woman lying in the dark, and it is easy to walk past.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Listen to who he is talking to.

The whole first part of that psalm is about God. He maketh me to lie down. He leadeth me. He restoreth my soul. Then the valley starts. And the moment it does, the psalm turns and speaks straight to Him. For thou art with me. Not he. Thou. Right there in the middle of the verse, God stops being the subject of the sentence and becomes the One being spoken to.

That is a man who had not said it out loud either, until the dark made him.

And it is the same for you, tonight, at your age and in your own bed, because His word did not put that turn in the psalm for David alone and it is the Holy Spirit who is prompting you toward it. The talking to Him is not something you have to work up to. It is already yours to do, in the dark, without sitting up.

Then look at the reason he gives, because it is not the one we would put there.

He does not say he fears no evil because he is brave, or because he has thought it through, or because there is nothing in the valley. He says it because thou art with me. The whole weight of it rests on a Person being present. Not on a feeling being settled first.

You are not being asked to stop being afraid before God will come near you. Psalm 23:4 puts Him in the valley with the man while the man is still walking through it, and His Spirit does not wait at the top of the hill for your nerves to settle.

And notice the word through. Not around. Not over. Through, which is a word about walking and coming out the other side, and a shepherd who goes in is a shepherd who comes out.

Now the one thing I cannot say. I am not going to tell you how many mornings are in front of you. I do not know, and neither does anybody who tells you they do. What His word does settle, and what the Holy Spirit is saying over that bed of yours right now, is who is with you on both sides of the sleep. You are His going under and you are His either way it goes, and no night, not this one, decides that.

That is the rod and the staff. Not the valley being canceled. His tools in His hands, in there with you.