Awake In A World That Went To Bed

The shift ended at twenty past two, and by ten to three he had his key in his own front door, which is a strange hour to be arriving anywhere.

He turned it quietly out of habit, although there was nobody upstairs to wake. The hall light he left off. The kitchen light he put on, and stood in it with his coat still on and the smell of the warehouse still in the wool of it, and he made toast, because a body does not go straight from a loading bay to a pillow. Everyone who works nights knows that. Almost nobody who works days believes it.

Ten past three. He ate standing up at the counter, looking at the window over the sink, which at that hour is not a window at all. It is a black mirror with a kitchen in it, and a man in a coat, and behind him a hallway where nothing is moving.

Outside, the whole street was doing the one ordinary thing he could not do. Curtains drawn. A porch light on a timer two doors down. A car under a cover with the frost already starting on it. Somewhere a boiler clicked on for somebody's morning, four hours ahead of them, and clicked off again.

He rinsed the plate. He brushed his teeth in a bathroom with dry towels and no steam on the mirror, a room that had gone cold hours ago without him. Then he lay down with the curtain pulled and a seam of streetlight along the top of it, and his body sat up inside itself and said, clearly and politely, no.

Not now. Not yet. We are not doing this now.

So he lay there. And the thing that came for him was not fear exactly. It was quieter and more particular than fear, and if you have ever lain down at four in the morning after a shift you already know the shape of it.

It is this. Everyone I love went to bed a long time ago. Whatever I am carrying tonight, I am carrying it by myself, because it would be an unkindness to wake anybody for it, and by the time they are up I will have gone under and the whole thing will look smaller and I will not say it. The world has arranged itself around a day I do not live in. I am awake in the wrong half of the clock, and there is nobody to be awake with.

He turned over. The seam of light stayed exactly where it was.

That is you, and I think you know the hour I mean.

Before another word, I want to say this one. What is happening to you at this hour is not a failure of faith. It is not a sign that you have drifted or gone cold or stopped trusting. You are tired in the deepest way a person can be tired, your body has been asked to live against the light, and the loneliness that comes with that is not a spiritual verdict on you. Nobody is disappointed in you tonight. Not one person, and least of all God.

The night shines like the day

There is a man in the Bible who could not settle either, and he wrote it down at what reads very much like this hour.

He tries an escape first, the way everybody does. He imagines pulling the dark over himself like a coat and disappearing under it.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12

Let that be read to you slowly, because the middle of it is where the whole thing turns.

Even the night shall be light about me.

He is not saying the dark is harmless. He is not saying he likes it. He is saying the thing he was going to hide inside has a light in it already, and the light is a Person, and the Person was in the room before he lay down.

So hear this, at whatever hour you are hearing it. You are not in a different half of the day from God. The night and the day are alike to Him, which is Psalm 139:12 in plain words, and it means He keeps no office hours and He is not asleep with the rest of the street. And it is not these sentences keeping you company. It is the Holy Spirit, who does not go off shift, holding you inside the very hour His word calls full of light.

Notice, too, what the psalm does not say. It does not say the darkness is bright to the man. It says it is bright to God. That is a different claim and it is the one that helps at four in the morning, because on this particular night nobody is asking you to see very much. The seeing is His. Yours is only to be seen.

Now the other half of it, which is not the dark at all. It is the arithmetic. Everyone is asleep, therefore I am on my own, therefore this is mine to hold until somebody wakes up. And the psalm never once says the man is alone and coping well. It says the opposite: there is no seam of the night narrow enough to slip him out of God's sight, and no hour so odd that he arrives in it unaccompanied.

So take this, and take it as a fact rather than as encouragement. You have company right now. Not company arriving later when somebody's alarm goes: company already in the kitchen, already in the room with the seam of light, because the same Spirit who moved over the deep before there was any morning at all is the one keeping this hour with you, and the word that says the night shines as the day was true long before you were tired.

And there is a mercy folded into the wrong half of the clock that nobody tells you about, so I will. The people praying at three in the morning are not the leftovers of the praying church. They are its night watch. Somebody has to be awake while the town sleeps, and tonight, whether you applied for the post or not, it is you.

You were not overlooked when the rest of the street was handed its rest. You were handed a different watch, and the God who keeps Israel and never once slumbers is keeping it beside you, exactly as Psalm 121:4 has it, and it is His Spirit and not your willpower holding you steady in it.