The Same Dream Three Times A Week

Twenty-two minutes past eleven, going by the microwave, the only clock in her kitchen she actually trusts.

She is filling a glass of water she does not want.

It takes about forty seconds if she runs the tap slow, which she does. Forty seconds is nothing. But it is forty seconds of not being in bed, and she has become quietly expert at finding them. The trash needed taking out. The cushions needed straightening. She wiped a counter that was already clean, twice, and knew she was doing it while she did it.

Since spring it has come three times a week. Not every night, which is somehow worse: every night would at least be a rhythm you could plan against. Three times a week means she goes up the stairs not knowing, already listening for it by the third step, the way you listen for a car you thought you heard.

She is thirty-six, good at her job, and has never once said out loud, "I am frightened of going to sleep," because of how it would sound in a bright kitchen with the lights on. It sounds like a child's problem. It is not one. It has been eating her Tuesdays since April.

She has tried what people try. A later bedtime, so she would be too tired for it. An earlier one, for more runway. She looked things up on her phone at one in the morning, which helped nobody. She prayed about it properly, then lay there wondering whether she had done that wrong too.

She drinks about a third of the glass and pours the rest away, which is what she always does.

Then she turns off the kitchen light and stands still for a second in the dark by the door, the hallway in front of her and the stairs past that, feeling her own chest tighten over a thing that has not happened, in a house where nothing is wrong.

That is you, holding your own version of that glass. Maybe it is the last episode of something you already know the ending of, or laundry that could have waited until Saturday. You know exactly where your own forty seconds live.

So hear this before anything else. What is happening to you is not a failure of faith. A frightened person is not a faithless person, and there is nothing wrong with your walk with God because your chest goes tight at the bottom of your own stairs. Nobody is disappointed in you at twenty past eleven. Not God. Not one soul who knows Him.

I Am Not Going To Tell You What It Means

Two things I am not going to do, and I want them said out loud.

I am not going to ask you what happens in it. It has been carried three times a week since spring, and it does not need handing to a stranger to count here.

And I am not going to tell you what it means. Not as a symbol, not as a warning, not as a coded message to sit up and decode. There are people who will do that for you, warmly and confidently, and I am not one of them. A dream handed an interpretation at midnight is a dream with homework attached, and there is enough to hold already.

What I will do instead is show you what God says He is doing in the night.

Here is a man who wrote about nights, on a stretch of life when sleeping was dangerous and he did it in caves.

I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons. I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.Psalm 16:7-8

Look at the plural first. Night seasons. Not one rough night to be gotten through, but a run of them, a spring that turned into a summer. He is not writing about one unlucky Tuesday, and neither are you.

Then look at what he says God is doing in them. Giving counsel. Instructing. Standing at the right hand. Notice what is nowhere in that sentence: God does not hand over an explanation, and He does not set a puzzle and go quiet on it. The night is not an exam you have been sitting badly since spring.

You are not alone in that room when the light goes off, and that is not a nice thought to work up on the third stair. It is what is written, present tense, with no conditions hung off it: He is at your right hand, Psalm 16:8. And it is the Holy Spirit, not this paragraph, who carries that off the page and into a dark landing at half past eleven.

The right hand mattered in David's world for a plain physical reason. A man carried his shield on his left. His right side was the open one, the side he could not cover, and it was where his defender stood. It is a position, and it is taken.

You have a defender standing on the exposed side of you tonight, and He does not hand the watch to anybody and He does not sleep. That is His word for it, and Psalm 121 says the One keeping you does not so much as slumber. The Holy Spirit is making that real in a body already braced at the bottom of the stairs.

What God does in the night seasons is nearer to what a father does with a child asleep in the back of the car: carries them in, gets the shoes off, says nothing about it in the morning. Quiet work, done for you rather than with you, and you are not required to be conscious for any of it.

You are being taught in your night seasons and never interrogated in them. Scripture hands that whole work to God and does not once hand you the job of decoding it, and it is His Spirit who does it in a person asleep and managing absolutely nothing.

You may notice there is no method here. That is deliberate: a technique would mean a way to fumble it, and this was never going to sit on you.

You were kept through every one of those nights since spring. Not one was unattended, and not one was survived on your own strength while God stood back. You did not know it at the time and it was true anyway, because what makes it true is His word and never your awareness of it, and the Holy Spirit is not a presence you have to feel in order to be standing next to.