They Started After The Hospital

The plastic bracelet is still in the drawer of the hall table, under the takeout menus, with his name printed on it and a date he would rather not read.

He was in for nine days. He is home. Everybody has said the word lucky to him at least twice. They are right, and he says thank you and means it.

It is twenty past four and he is sitting on the edge of the bed with both feet flat on the carpet.

He does not remember much of it. That is the strange part, and he does not bother telling anybody, because there is no story to tell. Nothing he could write down. There is only the waking: bolt upright, heart going like a fist on a door, the sheet cold at the small of his back, and a certainty about something he cannot name that leaves the fear behind it like a tide going out over stones.

Four nights out of seven, near enough, since the second week home.

Downstairs, the chair by the radiator has quietly become the bed. Down at half past four, television on with the sound almost off, and he sleeps from five until seven. That sleep is fine. It is the bed that is the problem, and he knows how that sounds.

He has told his wife about some of the nights. He has not told her the number. He has not mentioned it to the doctor at all, because the follow up appointment is about his chest, and it feels like the wrong thing to raise in a ten minute slot.

What frightens him is not really the nights. It is the arithmetic. Week two was expected. Eleven weeks is beginning to look less like weather and more like a shape.

That is you, on the edge of the bed with your feet on the carpet. Or in the chair by the radiator at ten to five. Or flat on your back at one in the morning, putting off sleep, because sleep is the door.

And hear this before anything else. This is not a failure of faith. A body that has been through something does this. It is not a punishment, it is not a message you are failing to decode, and nobody in heaven is disappointed in you at twenty past four.

The psalm never explains the night

I am going to put one line under you, and there is nothing you have to do with it correctly.

You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day.Psalm 91:5

Notice first that it is in there at all. The terror of the night is a phrase in the Bible. Somebody was sitting up in the dark long before this year, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that a name for that hour went into the songbook.

Now notice what the verse does not do. It does not tell you what the terror means. Read the line standing immediately before it and there is the whole of what is offered: He covers you with his pinions, and under his wings you find refuge. A wing goes over. That is the answer, and the entire answer.

So I am not going to interpret your nights either. I do not know what your mind is doing at four in the morning, and I would not tell you if I thought I did. What I have is what the psalm has, which is a covering, and a covering does not wait for an explanation.

And hear what is already yours while the sheet is still cold. You are covered. Not covered later, once the nights settle and you have earned a run of good ones: covered now, because His word puts a wing over the person in the dark before it says one word about fear, and it is His Spirit, not your understanding, who keeps a man who cannot say what woke him.

Now the plainest thing in this message, said once and warmly. A body and a mind doing this deserve to be looked at. Take it to the doctor. Take it to the follow up appointment even though the slot was booked about your chest, because the nights are part of what happened to you. If trauma therapy is offered, that is good and ordinary care and it is not a shortfall of trust. And if something has been prescribed for you, keep taking it exactly as the doctor said, and change nothing because of anything you read anywhere, this included.

Now let me name what has been happening at twenty past four.

Sleep has stopped being a place you go and started being a door you stand in front of, and the standing costs more than the waking does. By one in the morning with the lamp still on, the night has already had five hours out of you and nothing has even happened.

So take the psalm at its word about the room you are lying in. You have a covering over this bed that no good night put there and no bad night takes off. That is written down, not felt, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a written thing hold weight in a bedroom at twenty past four.

Now hear what I am not doing. I am not going to describe anything to you, and I am not going to tell you what any of it means. There is no lurid picture here and there will not be one: a frightened person does not need a more detailed fear, and God has never made anybody more afraid in order to set them free.

I am not handing you a technique either. There is no correct wording and no order to get right, and nothing here fails if you fall asleep halfway through. Words are not spells. What is going under you tonight is not a method. It is a line sung by frightened people centuries before your ward had a number.

Let me name the lie, so that it can be named and gone. The lie is that a body still reacting at eleven weeks is a soul that did not trust God. You have never once been told that by God, it is not written anywhere in Scripture, and His Spirit has never taught anybody anything by dread.

The lonely part is not the waking. It is that it has stopped being something you say out loud, because everybody keeps calling you lucky, and there is no way to say "I am frightened of my own bed" to a person who is simply glad to have you back.