Too Tired To Sleep

The fourth stair from the bottom makes a sound like a small animal, so she steps over it entirely, one long stride in the dark with her hand sliding up the rail.

She has been up since ten to two. He went down at nine minutes past three, and she knows it was nine minutes past because she looked, already doing the arithmetic on the landing: four hours if he goes through, two if he does not.

Now she is lying on top of the covers, because getting under them felt like a decision and she did not have one left. Her cardigan is still on. Her arm is still curved in the shape it was holding, and it will not quite unbend.

On the shelf by the door, the monitor shows one small green dot. It brightens when he moves. She watches it the way people watch a pot.

Downstairs the bottle stands upside down on the rack where she left it, and the house has gone to that particular quiet that only exists between three and four.

And she is so tired that her eyes ache, and she is not going to sleep.

That is the part nobody warned her about. Not the being up. It is this: lying down at last, emptied out, with a whole hour of quiet in her hands, and finding that her body will not accept it.

Something in her is still standing at the edge of the crib, still listening past the wall into a room where a very small person is breathing and she cannot see him do it. Her ears are doing a job her arms finished twenty minutes ago.

Too tired to sleep. Too wired to stop.

So she runs the numbers again, because that is what a mind does when it has nowhere to put its hands. If he wakes at five. If he sleeps through and she does not. If tomorrow is the day it all catches up with her in front of somebody who matters.

And at some point she says it out loud, to nobody at all.

I do not know how to put it down.

That is the truest sentence spoken in that house tonight, and it is not a complaint.

That is you, with the green dot on the shelf.

Maybe there is no baby in your house. Maybe it is a parent down the hall who calls out twice a night, or a shift that finishes at two, or a body that wakes at the same hour whether or not anything woke it. The furniture changes; the state does not.

Before one more word, hear this from me. What is happening in your body tonight is not a failure of faith. It is not a spiritual weakness and it is not a fault in your character. A nervous system that has been on watch for months does not power down because a person got into bed, and nobody in heaven is standing over you at three o'clock, disappointed. You are safe here. Let me teach you something gently, and you can keep your eyes closed the whole time.

The rest that is given, and the rest that is found

There is a sentence in the Gospels spoken to people who were worn through. Not to the rested and the tidy. To laborers, to the heavy laden, to people carrying religion and work and family at once.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.Matthew 11:28-29

Notice that rest arrives twice in those two verses, and it is not the same rest both times.

The first one is given. I will give you rest. Nothing is asked in exchange, no qualification is named, no state of mind is required. The only movement in the sentence is coming, and coming is what a tired person can still do.

The second one is found. Ye shall find rest unto your souls. That one is discovered inside something, the way a person finds a chair in a dark room by sitting down on it.

So hear this while you lie there. You are not being asked to earn the quiet you cannot get. You are the one He was speaking to in Matthew 11:28, and He said it to a room full of exhausted people rather than to the ones who had it together, and the invitation was written down and has never once been withdrawn. It is not these sentences doing anything in you tonight. It is the Holy Spirit carrying what He already said into a room He is already in.

Then look at what He hands over, because it is the whole point. He does not say, put your load down and lie in a field. He says, take my yoke.

A yoke is a carpenter's object: shaped, planed, fitted to one particular pair of shoulders so that it does not rub, and a badly made one wounds an animal inside a week. He spent years in a workshop before He said this.

His yoke is not a lighter load pretending to be no load. It is a better fit. And notice who is standing in the harness beside you: He says of Himself that He is meek and lowly in heart, which is His way of telling you the pace belongs to the slower one. You have a companion in that harness tonight who does not stride ahead of a woman running on four hours of sleep. That is His word about Himself and not my opinion of Him, and His Spirit is the one who makes it felt rather than merely known.

Now the last phrase, and this is the one for three in the morning. Rest unto your souls. Not rest unto your night, and not eight unbroken hours, which He does not promise anywhere in Scripture and which I am not going to promise you either.

Soul rest is the piece that does not depend on the sleep. It is available in a bed that will be interrupted, in a chair by a crib, on a bathroom floor at four in the morning, and it does not wait for conditions to improve.

So here is what is already true of you while your arm is still curved in the shape of a sleeping child. You are held tonight by the One who does not need you conscious in order to hold you, and that was true of every night you spent listening past a wall. Psalm 121:4 calls Him the keeper who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and His Spirit is in that room with you now, keeping watch in the very place your ears cannot reach.