The Walk To The Bathroom In The Dark

You have been awake eleven minutes and you already know how this goes.

You have not moved. That is the first rule, though nobody taught it to you and you would never say it out loud. Lying completely still seems to keep the room the size it is. The moment you move, the room gets bigger and the doorway becomes a doorway again.

So you lie there and you start the arithmetic.

How much did you drink after eight. Whether it is really that bad or only the idea of it. Whether six is close enough to hold out for, and what time it actually is now, and whether checking the phone is worth the brightness. You run the numbers again. You get the same answer you got the last four nights and you refuse it the same way.

Twelve feet. That is the distance. Out of the bed, three steps to the door, along the wall past the linen closet, and the switch is on the left at shoulder height. Twelve feet there and twelve feet back, and the back is always worse, because on the way back there is something behind you and the bed is a long way off and you go faster than a grown adult should have to go.

And that is the part that sits on your chest tonight. Not the hallway.

You are forty-one. You have a mortgage. You handle things all day that would flatten other people, and yesterday you sat calmly in a room and made a decision that nine other adults are relying on. You checked under a bed for somebody else's child once and you were entirely convincing.

And here you are, flat on your back at ten past three, doing math so you do not have to cross your own corridor.

Keep your eyes shut. I mean that. Every single thing in this message can be done lying exactly as you are, in the dark, with the light off and nothing to look at and nothing to read. If this is being read aloud to you, leave it that way. There is one small thing to do with your hands and I will tell you when.

And the first thing to say, before any of the rest of it, is that this is not a failure of faith. Frightened has never been the same word as faithless, and nobody in heaven is embarrassed by you at ten past three.

Micah wrote it from inside the dark

There is a line in one of the smallest books in the Bible, spoken by a man who is not looking back at a bad season from somewhere safe. He is in it while he says it.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

Read the second half again, slowly. Not when the dark lifts. Not once morning comes. When I sit in darkness.

The Hebrew is eshev, from yashav, which means to sit, to stay, to settle in, to dwell. It is not the verb for passing through a dark place on the way to a brighter one. It is the verb for being still in it. A person who is only visiting the dark does not need this sentence. A person who has been sitting in it a while does.

And there is something else in the line, which is what it does not have. In the Hebrew, the second half carries no verb at all. Your translation supplies shall be, gently and correctly, because English needs a verb to stand a sentence up. The Hebrew simply sets three things down side by side: when I sit in darkness, the Lord, a light to me. No becoming. No waiting for it. Just the fact of Him, laid beside the fact of the dark.

So here is what is true of you at ten past three, and it is not a kind thought I am handing you. You are sitting in the dark and the Lord is a light to you in it, right where you are lying, exactly as Micah 7:8 has it. And it is not this sentence doing anything in the room. It is the Holy Spirit carrying His own written word into a bedroom He has been in all night.

Now let me say the thing about the shame, because I think the shame is the actual weight and the hallway is only where it shows up.

Hear it before another minute of that goes by. You are not a coward and you never have been. A body lying in the dark is working with almost nothing: no light, no depth, no edges, and a hearing system that gets sharper the second the eyes go useless. What it does with that is precisely what it was built to do. Scripture never once calls a frightened person faithless, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you tonight shaking His head at a grown adult who does not like the corridor.

And nothing here is going to explain your nights back to you. Not the dreams, not the images, not the one that keeps coming back. I do not know what they mean, nobody at this hour knows, and a stranger telling you what your own sleeping mind is saying is the last thing that would help you. So none of that is coming.

What is coming is a corridor with somebody in it. Those twelve feet of floorboard sit inside a house the Lord has already claimed, and you have not walked them unaccompanied once, not on any of the nights you thought you did. His word says He goes before you and is with you and does not fail you, and His Spirit is the one making that true at the exact hour when nothing feels true.