The Dream That Stops In The Same Place

The clock says 4:41 and he is sitting up before he knows he is awake.

Same place. Every time. Not the whole dream and not a story with a beginning: one stretch of it, and then the point where it stops, always the same point, and he is out of it and upright with his heart going in his ears.

He is fifty-one. He was nineteen the first time.

He does not wake her. He does what he has done for thirty-two years: puts both feet on the carpet and waits for the floor to be a floor again. Then down the stairs, over the third step from the bottom because it creaks and he stopped thinking about that long ago. Kitchen. He runs the cold tap until it actually runs cold and drinks half a glass at the sink in the dark.

Then the part nobody in his life knows about.

He sits down at the kitchen table and he tries to work out what it means.

Forty minutes, most nights, for thirty-two years. In his twenties he was sure it was a memory and went looking for the memory. In his thirties a man at work said something about symbols and he read most of a book about it and put it in a drawer. In his forties he decided it was probably nothing, which held up about four months. Somewhere in there he started asking God what it meant, and the kitchen stayed quiet, and he took the quiet as a mark against himself and has carried it that way ever since.

By half past five the window is going the color of dishwater and the furnace comes on. The day starts whether or not he has solved anything, and in thirty-two years he has never once solved anything, and the not solving has taken more out of him than the dream ever did.

That is you, at whatever your clock says.

Maybe yours is 2:15, maybe nine minutes before the alarm. Maybe you were nineteen, maybe you were seven, maybe it has simply been there as far back as you can remember. But you know the place it stops. You could put your finger on it. And most of the people who love you have no idea it is still happening, because you stopped mentioning it years ago.

And before another word, hear this, because it has sat on you for years under a different name: what happens to you at that hour is not a failure of faith. It is not a mark against you, it is not something you would have grown out of by now if you had prayed harder, and nobody in heaven is disappointed in you at twenty to five in the morning.

He Put The Fear And The Trust In The Same Sentence

Before we go anywhere near the verse, one thing, and I want it plain.

I am not going to tell you what your dream means.

Not because I am handling you carefully, and not because there is some rule against it. Because I do not know. Nobody in your kitchen knows, and a guess in a confident voice would be one more thing to carry down those stairs at twenty to five. You have already given decades to the solving. I am not adding to that bill tonight.

So we go to what is written, to a man who was frightened and wrote it down, and we let His Spirit carry it from there.

David was in Gath when he wrote Psalm 56, in the hands of people with every reason to want him dead, and what he did with the fear was put it in a song and hand it to the choir. Public worship, with the fear left in.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.Psalm 56:3-4

Read the first four words slowly. What time I am afraid. Not if. Not I used to be. What time means whenever, at the hour it happens, and it has an hour built into it, the way yours has a number on a clock.

He did not wait to stop being afraid before he trusted. Both things are in the sentence at once, at the same hour, in the same man. Trust was never the absence of fear. Trust is where your hand goes while your heart is still going.

So take it plainly, because it was said plainly. You are not disqualified at 4:41. The fear does not put you outside anything and it never has: Psalm 56:3 has a frightened man trusting in the same breath, and God kept that line in the songbook so you would have it in your mouth tonight. And it is not these sentences doing anything to you in a dark kitchen. It is the Holy Spirit carrying what He already said into a room He is already standing in.

Then notice what David praises. In God I will praise his word. Not the outcome, which he did not have, and not the explanation, which nobody gave him. The word: the thing that had been said, praised before one circumstance had moved.

Which means you have nothing to decode tonight. Nowhere in this psalm and nowhere else in Scripture are you handed the job of interpreting your own sleep before you are allowed peace, and the Holy Spirit is not sitting at your kitchen table waiting for you to name the thing correctly. The word is what gets praised here, and the word is already yours, in the dark, unsolved.

And the last line names a limit out loud: I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. Flesh is what has hands. David is counting what is actually in the room, and so are you. There is a floor under your feet. There is a tap that runs cold.

And this is bigger than the floor: the hours you are not conscious for are not hours you are unguarded in. His word says the One who keeps you does not slumber and does not sleep, and the same Spirit who is with you at noon does not sign off at the bedroom door. You were kept through every one of those nights since you were nineteen. You are kept tonight.