The Green Dot at One in the Morning

It is a circle about two millimetres across, and it is the most important object in this house.

Marguerite is sixty-one and she could not tell you how the settings work, or what any of the other icons do, or why the thing sometimes reorders itself. She knows one thing on that screen. If the little green dot is showing beside her daughter's name, then somewhere in the world, at this moment, Cerys has a phone in her hand.

That is all it means. She knows that is all it means. She has told herself that in daylight, sensibly, in her own voice.

At one in the morning it means she is alive.

The routine is fixed and she has never described it to anybody. Lights off at half eleven. Phone face down on the bedside table, because face down is a kind of self-discipline. Then, at some point that varies, the turning over of the phone, which she does with the screen tilted away so it does not light the room, as though there were anybody in the room to disturb.

Green. Put it down.

Twenty minutes. Green. Put it down.

And then the one where it is gray.

It has gone out at ten past one on a Thursday and the whole of Marguerite has gone with it. She lies there running two films at once. The first one is the sensible film: the battery died, or she is asleep, or she is at Nadia's and there is no signal in that basement flat, and this is all completely ordinary. The second film has no words in it at all and it is much faster and it is the one that gets her out of bed and downstairs to stand in the kitchen with her hand on the cold worktop.

She has never once rung at that hour. She would not do that to her. She just stands in the dark kitchen until something moves, or until it gets light, or until she gets cold enough to go back up.

She has been doing this since February.

If you asked Cerys, she would say her mom has been great about it. Really great. Really calm. And she would mean it, because Marguerite has been magnificent in daylight, and nobody in that family has any idea what one in the morning looks like.

And here is where I stop talking about Marguerite, because you have your own version of that dot.

It might not be a screen. It might be listening for a car on the gravel. It might be the way you check that a name has not appeared in the local news. It might be a text you send at a certain hour every day that is phrased to look casual and has been drafted twice.

You are not frightened for yourself. You would take it in a heartbeat if it could be moved onto you. That is exactly the trouble, because there is nowhere to put this one down, and no amount of being sensible in daylight has ever once helped at ten past one.

The watch was never yours to hold alone

The first thing I want to take off you is the idea that any of this is a fault.

Watching is not unbelief. It is love with nowhere to put itself. You are not frightened because you have failed to trust God with her, you are frightened because you would die for her and you cannot reach her, and those are two different situations entirely and only one of them is a spiritual problem, and it is not yours.

And I want to be plain about a second thing, because somewhere in you there is a whisper suggesting it: your fear is not doing her any harm. It is not leaking through the wall at her. It is not calling anything down. That is not how any of this works, and the whisper that says otherwise has never been true and is not true tonight. Nowhere in the written word is a frightened parent held responsible for the outcome, and it is His Spirit and not your vigilance that has been doing the keeping.

Now hear who else is awake at one in the morning.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

That is a song people sang walking uphill in the dark towards Jerusalem, with their children somewhere in the group and bandits in those hills, and it is the most practical thing in the psalm.

Read what it actually claims, because it is not what we usually take from it.

It does not say the road is safe. It does not say nothing happens to anybody. It says there is a Keeper, and the Keeper does not go off shift.

That word keeps is a watchman's word. It is the man on the wall. And the promise sitting in the middle of that psalm is not about outcomes, it is about coverage: there is no hour, none, in which the watch is unmanned. Not the hour you fall asleep. Not the hour the battery dies. Not the hour she is somewhere you have never seen with people you have never met.

You have been standing a second watch beside Someone who has never once needed relieving. That is Psalm 121 as it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a line about a watchman into a dark kitchen at ten past one.

He is not asking you to stop caring, and He is not asking you to stop checking, and if you look at the dot tonight that is not a failure. He is telling you that the watch does not depend on your eyes being open, and it never has, including on every night you did sleep, which is most of them, and she came through those too.