He Was Alive And Ordinary In It

She is awake at two minutes to six, and for about four seconds everything is fine.

Then the heating clicks on under the floor, and the room comes back, and she remembers.

In the dream her father was in her kitchen. Not his kitchen. Hers, the one with the cabinet door that hangs crooked because he never got around to fixing it. He had the navy fleece on, the one with the fraying cuff. He was at the counter with his back to her, doing something to the toaster, and he was complaining. That is the part. He was complaining about the milk.

"You've gone over to the two percent," he said, not even turning around. "I don't know what's happened to you."

And she laughed at him. She said something about him drinking whole milk for forty years and look where it got him, and he made that noise he made, the half a laugh out through the nose, and reached past her for the tractor mug.

That is all it was. There was no message. He did not tell her he was all right, or that he was proud of her. He stood in her kitchen in a fleece and was annoyed about milk, and it was so exactly him that her whole body believed it.

Fourteen months. Fourteen months of the phone call and the hospital corridor and the parking lot after the service and the box of his shirts still in the guest room. Then twenty minutes of a Tuesday in which none of it had happened yet.

She does not move. Moving is the start of the day, and the day means it is real. She lies there and tries to fall asleep on purpose at six in the morning, so she can get back to a kitchen that does not exist.

It does not work. It never works.

And underneath it there is a second thing, quieter and meaner: the thought that she should be further along than this. That other people manage. That there is something morbid about a grown woman lying in the dark trying to dream her way back to a man complaining about milk.

She gets up at ten past six, because the dog needs to go out.

That is you.

Awake far too early, on your side in the dark, doing the arithmetic of how long it has been and how badly you are doing it.

And before anything else I want this said plainly, because it is the thing nobody says to you at the church door. What happened in your sleep was not a failure of anything. Not of faith, not of healing. Nothing about it is going backwards. A heart that loved somebody does not stop knowing their voice because a calendar turned over, and I have never once seen God look at a person lying in that bed at six in the morning and be disappointed in them.

The Lord heard the sound of it

I am not going to tell you what the dream meant.

That is a decision and not an oversight. Two things get handed to you after a morning like this, and both are offered kindly. One says it was him, that he came, that he was allowed to. The other says it was your brain doing its filing while you slept. I am putting neither in your hands. I do not know, Scripture does not say, and a shepherd who fills a silence God left open is only giving you one more thing to carry.

Here is what I do know, and it is written down.

I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping... The LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. The LORD has heard my plea; the LORD accepts my prayer.Psalm 6:6-9

Look at what David is doing there, because it is not praying well. He is soaking a bed. His eye is wasting away with grief, and he is weary, which is the tiredness of somebody who knows he is going to do this again tomorrow.

Then comes the turn, and notice what the turn is not. It is not "the Lord has explained it to me." It is not "the Lord has taken it off me." It is this: the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.

The sound of it. Not the words of it. There were no words at two minutes to six. There was a noise made into a pillow so the rest of the house would not hear, and Psalm 6:8 says God heard that, and heard it as prayer, at the moment it was made, and not later once it had been tidied into sentences. You were heard this morning before you were awake enough to ask for anything, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that written sentence into the room where you are lying. What you are holding is not my reassurance. It is His word.

Then verse nine, and one word in it. The Lord accepts my prayer. Accepts is not tolerates. It is the word for a gift being taken out of somebody's hands and kept. So hear it where you are lying. You have a Father who took what you handed Him at six o'clock this morning, sound and all, and never asked you to say it better first. That is Psalm 6:9, written down centuries ago, and the same Spirit who moved the man who wrote it is moving it into your bedroom now.

About the man in the navy fleece I will say only what is written, and it is less than you want and steadier than you think. Scripture says God keeps what belongs to Him, and that death did not get the last word over anybody who is in Christ. It does not say what a dream is. It does not say he was standing there. I am not handing you a comfort God did not sign, because that kind of comfort has a short life and leaves a person worse off than it found them.

What I can hand you is the room. He was in the room. There was not one second of two minutes to six when His Spirit was not keeping that watch, exactly as His word promised.

Which leaves the voice doing the arithmetic. It sounds like maturity. It is an accusation with a calendar in its hand. Psalm 6 has no date on it, and nowhere in Scripture is a grieving person put on a clock and told they are running late. You are a person who loved somebody, doing what love does at six in the morning, and His Spirit is not standing over that bed with a stopwatch, because His word never gave Him one to hold.