The Drop Just As You Go Under

Ten to two, and it is finally happening.

He has been at this since half past eleven. He knows the whole route by now: the turning over, the counting backward and losing the thread, the long stretch where he lies still and pretends to be a person who is asleep.

But this is different. The thoughts have gone soft and stupid, which is the sign. He is thinking about somebody at work, and then, with no join in the middle, about a boat, and some quiet part of him notices the boat and thinks, good, we are nearly there. The bed has started to feel a long way down. The radiator is ticking as it cools and the ticking is getting further away.

He lets go.

And the floor goes.

One step off a curb that is not there. His whole body kicks, hard, the leg straightening out and one arm coming up off the duvet, and his heart is suddenly going like he has run for a bus, and he is flat on his back with his eyes wide open looking at a ceiling he cannot see.

Beside him she stirs and does not wake. The radiator ticks. Out on the bypass a truck changes gear.

He lies there and waits for his chest to come down, which takes about a minute and a half, and then he starts again.

And here is where it turns into the thing it has become. Because now he is watching for it. He gets close, the thoughts start going soft, and some part of him is standing at the edge with its hand out, ready to catch him. The watching is the exact thing that keeps him awake. He knows that, and knowing it changes nothing at all.

He is thirty four years old, tired to the bone, in a warm bed in a safe house next to somebody he loves, and he is afraid of the one thing he has wanted since half past eleven.

Now stop being him.

Because it is your drop. Yours might be the step that is not there, or the whole bed tipping slowly to one side, or the pure falling with nothing under it, and it comes at the exact second you were finally going, and it takes the rest of the night with it.

Hear this first and let it settle. What is happening to you is not a failure of faith. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong between you and God, and it is not a fault in your spirit. Bodies startle. Nobody in heaven is standing over your bed at ten to two, disappointed in you.

And I am not going to tell you what any of it means. Not the falling, not the step, not anything your mind has put in front of you in the dark. That is not what this is, and I would not guess if you asked me to. What you are getting tonight is not an explanation. It is a floor.

The word Moses put under the falling

Moses is at the end of his life, and he is not going into the country. The people are. His last recorded act is to stand in front of them, tribe by tribe, and bless them, and in the middle of it he sets down a sentence that frightened people have been holding onto ever since.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Look at where he put the arms. Not around. Not in front. Underneath.

He could have said the arms are around you. It would have been true, and it would have been a different promise: around is for a person standing up. Underneath is for a person going down. Moses chose the word for the direction of a fall.

And everlasting. Not arms that arrive. Not arms that get there in time, which would mean there is a window in which they might not. Arms that are already under, that always have been, that were under the place you land long before you started falling toward it.

So carry that into the exact half second you are afraid of. The moment your body lets go and the floor goes out from under you is not the moment you are uncovered. It is the moment Deuteronomy 33:27 was written for, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your grip on the edge, who is holding what is underneath you while you go.

And look at what your body has done, because it did it to protect you. It felt the drop once, filed it under danger, and now it posts a guard at the edge of sleep. So you get close, the guard sits up, and you are awake again. You have been doing two jobs every night for weeks: going under, and standing watch over yourself going under. His word hands that watch to Someone else, and His Spirit is the One who actually keeps it.

You have not failed at trusting God because your leg kicked. A body startling on the threshold of sleep is a body, not a verdict, and Scripture nowhere makes rest an examination you sit every night and either pass or fail. What you have is a nervous system that loves you clumsily, and the same Spirit who breathed that blessing through Moses is in the room with it, in no hurry at all.

And if the nights have been going like this for weeks, say so plainly to your doctor. Sleep is a body matter as much as a heart matter, and going to the people whose work it is is good, ordinary, and no failure of trust.

You are not required to let go well. If I could put one thing in your hand tonight it would be that. There is no correct way to go under, and nothing here stops working if you do it badly or forget it halfway. The going down is not the dangerous part. It is the part with the arms in it, and His word calls those arms everlasting while His Spirit says it again over your bed at ten to two.