The Hall Light At Forty-Eight

She is forty-eight years old and she has just done it again.

Up the stairs last, the way she always goes up last. Hand out for the switch at the top of the landing. Thumb resting on the plate, worn shiny at one corner by thirty years of other people's thumbs and now by hers.

And then not pressing it.

She stands there a second longer than a person needs to stand anywhere. Then she takes her hand back and goes into the bedroom and leaves the door open the width of four fingers, and the bar of yellow light lies across the carpet along the foot of the bed. That is how she will sleep, if she sleeps.

The bulb in that fitting is forty watts instead of sixty. She changed it herself, because a softer light is less of an announcement, and there is nobody else in this house to read the announcement.

That is the part that gets her. She has a job where people come to her doorway to ask what to do. She sat with her mother in a hospital room for eleven days and did not once come apart. Anybody who knows her would laugh at the idea that she is frightened of anything, and she would laugh first.

She has done exactly that. A woman at work mentioned her own boy needing a nightlight, and the whole sentence came up her throat, I am forty-eight and I sleep with the hall light on, and she turned it into a joke about the dark and steered the morning elsewhere so fast it left a mark.

Some nights she wakes at three from something she cannot get hold of, gone before her eyes open, leaving nothing behind but the heartbeat. She has no way of knowing which kind of night this one will be, and the light on the landing does not know either, and it burns anyway.

That is you, at the top of your own stairs, with your thumb resting on a switch you are not going to press.

And before another word is said: what you are doing on that landing is not a failure of faith. It is not evidence that you do not trust God, and it is not something you were supposed to have outgrown by now. Nobody in heaven is keeping a note of your age against that bulb, and the shame you feel about forty watts of soft yellow light was not put there by Him.

The message was never about the bulb

There is a line near the front of John's first letter that he does not call a message. He calls it the message: three years beside Jesus folded down into one sentence a person could carry in the dark.

This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.1 John 1:5

Hear what it does not say. It does not say God gives light, or supplies it to people who have earned a decent night's sleep. It says God is light. Not something He operates. Something He is. And the back half is the half that always gets skipped. No darkness at all. Not very little. None.

So take that up your own stairs. That forty watt bulb is not the light in your house. It is a courtesy, a kindness you have quietly shown yourself, and it is not the thing keeping you. You are lit right now by Someone who has never once been off, and 1 John 1:5 is where it is written down. It is not this page doing anything in your hallway. It is the Holy Spirit, carrying what God already said, into a house He was standing in long before you came up the stairs.

Now let the number come off, because the number was always the weight and the bulb never was. Somewhere you picked up the idea that fear has an age limit and that you went past yours, and that idea is not in the book. What is in the book is a king with a kingdom to lose writing down what he does at bedtime: I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety, Psalm 4:8. You are not late, you are not behind, and you have not missed a milestone God never set. His Spirit holds no chart with your name at the top of it.

A word about the dreams. I am not going to tell you what yours mean, and nobody honest will. Scripture hands nobody a key to the inside of their own sleeping head.

What the word does instead is put Somebody in the room with you. The darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee, Psalm 139:12. You are exactly as seen at three in the morning as you are at three in the afternoon, and exactly as kept, and it is His Spirit who makes that live in you rather than the sound of the sentence. And what has cost you most was never the electricity: two things go up those stairs every night, the fear and the hiding of the fear, and only one of them was ever yours to carry. Cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you, wrote Peter, and the word he used means to fling a thing clean off your own back.

If your sleep has been like this for years, tell your doctor, in the actual words, to a person whose work it is to hear them. A doctor, a good therapist, medicine where medicine is needed: that is provision, and God is entirely inside provision.