Awake At The Same Minute Again

Three forty seven.

He does not look right away. Looking makes it official, and for twenty seconds after he surfaces there is still a version of this night where it is nearly five.

So he lies still. The pipes in the wall tick as the heat goes out of them. His body knows anyway. He turns his head, and the phone confirms it.

3:47.

Last night, 3:47. The night before, that minute or one either side of it, and back and back through a run of months he stopped counting because counting made it worse.

Then the arithmetic starts, and the arithmetic is the part nobody warns you about.

Alarm at six twenty. Two hours and thirty three minutes. If he goes under in the next ten minutes he still gets a solid two, and two is not nothing. Twenty minutes from now it is under two, and under two is the kind of day where he goes strange by mid afternoon. Running the sum wakes him further, which he knows, and knowing it does not stop him running it again nine minutes later with a smaller number in it.

He does not turn over. Turning over is a decision. Turning over announces to the room, and to the woman asleep beside him, that he is awake for the duration, and he is not ready to sign that yet.

So he lies on his back in the dark with his arms straight down at his sides like a man on a stretcher, and he waits.

And this is the part he cannot explain to anyone who has not done it. He is not frightened. Nothing in particular is wrong tonight. He is simply on duty, at 3:47, on a shift nobody put him down for, with no work to do on it and no permission to leave.

And underneath all of it, quiet and worn smooth from use, is the sentence. Not a thought exactly. More like a label he printed months ago and stuck on himself: I have become a man who wakes at 3:47.

Now stop being him.

Because it is your minute. Yours might be ten past two, or four fifteen, or twenty five to four, and you know it to the digit, and you are lying there this second doing the arithmetic on an alarm that is hours away.

So before anything else, hear this and let it be settled. Waking like this is not a failure of faith. It is not a verdict on your trust and it is not a fault in your spirit. Bodies wake. Some have learned an hour and they keep it faithfully, the way a dog learns a footstep on the path, and nobody in heaven is shaking their head at you at 3:47.

And I am not going to ask you to sleep. Not once, anywhere in this. There is nothing you must fall asleep in order to receive.

The verse with a man waking up in it

There is a psalm written by a man on the run from his own son. The city had gone over to Absalom, and David went up the Mount of Olives with his head covered and no shoes on his feet. He opens the psalm by counting how many people are saying out loud that God is finished with him.

And in the middle of that, he writes the least likely sentence in the song.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Three verbs. Lay down. Slept. Awaked. Nearly everyone quotes the first two and stops.

The third one is the one for you tonight. He put his waking up into the song. He did not leave it out, he did not apologize for it, and he did not treat it as the place where the night went wrong.

Now look at where he attaches the reason. For the LORD sustained me. That clause does not belong to the sleeping only. It carries all three of them. The sustaining was not a bonus paid out for the hours he managed to get. It was underneath the entire night, including the part where his eyes came open in the dark.

So hear it where you are, flat on your back with your arms at your sides. You are sustained at 3:47. Not once you get back under, and not on condition that the second half of the night behaves better than the first. Right now, in the state you are actually in. Psalm 3:5 puts it in the past tense because for the man who wrote it the matter was already closed, and God has never withdrawn a word He has spoken. And it is not these sentences doing anything in your chest. It is the Holy Spirit carrying what He settled long ago into a room He was already in before you woke.

You have already come out of hundreds of these. A psalm is not advice from somebody having an easy week, it is a dispatch from a man who came out, and so is that sentence. Every night you have lain awake, you were being held while you lay there, and every one of them ended. The word says the One who keeps you does not doze on the job, and His Spirit is what makes a very old line land in a dark room at the hour it was written for.

Here is what the counting has quietly done. It has turned the night into a quantity. Two hours and thirty three. A total that is not accumulating, and therefore an examination being sat and failed in the dark by somebody who never signed up to take it. The psalm does not treat a night as a quantity. It treats it as a Person who was present for it.

The hours do matter, and I am not going to pretend sleep is a small thing. If this has been running for weeks, say so plainly to your doctor. Sleep is a body matter as well as a heart matter, and going to the people whose work it is is good, ordinary, and no failure of trust.

But the hours are not what is holding you up, and they never were. You are held by the One who sustained a hunted man through a night with an army camped in the hills around him, and that grip does not loosen when the number gets smaller. Scripture puts the keeping of the night in His hands and not in yours, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in this room while you lie here.

And you are not the only one keeping this appointment. You have never met the others, because it happens alone, in the dark, and by breakfast it sounds like nothing worth saying. But His word has been read at three in the morning by more frightened people than either of us could count, and His Spirit has been doing this work in rooms like yours for a very long time.