What Your Head Does With A Hard Day

She took her shoes off outside the door, the way she had for eleven years, and left them on the mat with the laces still done up.

Half past eleven. The hall light on its low setting because the house was asleep. Uniform into the plastic tub by the machine, hands washed to the elbow, the water as hot as she could stand it. A slice of bread eaten standing over the sink, because sitting down means the day catches up with you.

She made a mug of tea and did not drink it. She never does. She makes it because making it takes four minutes, and she needed four minutes.

The house was fine. Her daughter's swimming bag hung wet on the bannister, which meant a conversation tomorrow she was already too tired to have.

She was not thinking about the afternoon. She would like that written down somewhere. She had handed over cleanly. She had said the right things in the corridor with her voice level the whole time, and she had driven home with the radio on something with talking in it, because music leaves gaps.

She was fine.

She got into bed at ten past midnight beside somebody already asleep, and she was fine right up until she closed her eyes.

Because that is when it starts. Not thinking. She can manage thinking. Sorting. Her head opening drawers she had not asked it to open, taking the day out, turning it over, putting some of it back in the wrong place. The corridor. The thing she said. The thing she did not say. A face arriving with the confidence of somebody who lives here now.

She lay on her back with her eyes open and did the arithmetic she does most nights. Six hours if I go now. Five and a half. Five.

And underneath the arithmetic, the sentence she has never said out loud at work and has never said out loud at home either.

I am frightened to go to sleep, and I have to be back in at seven.

That is you, with your shoes on the mat.

Maybe it is not a ward. Maybe it is a squad car, a call center at two in the morning, a classroom, a truck cab, a phone line people ring when there is nowhere else to ring. Ten past midnight is the same, and so is the sorting.

So before anything else, straight to you. This is not a failure of faith. A head that keeps handling what it was handed is not a soul that has gone cold, and a body still holding a shift you signed out of hours ago is not a body in rebellion against God. Nobody in heaven is disappointed in you tonight.

He does not go off shift

There is a psalm written by somebody who was not sleeping either, and the striking thing is who he talks to.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.Psalm 62:5-6

Read the first three words again. My soul. He is not talking to God yet. He is talking to his own interior, out loud, at an hour when it will not settle, and he does not ask it what is wrong or go back through the evening with it looking for the meaning.

He tells it where to wait.

And let me be plain, because this is where people get hurt. I am not going to tell you what your dreams mean. Nobody here is handing you an interpretation of what your head assembled at two in the morning out of a corridor and a sentence you wish you had said differently. A reading of your own sleep is a weight, not a comfort.

What it hands you instead is somewhere to put your weight while your head does what heads do. Twice he calls Him rock. Once he calls Him defense. Not a mood: a piece of geology, and a wall.

So hear this exactly where you are lying. You are not being asked to explain your day before God will keep you tonight. You have a rock, right now, at ten past midnight, on four and a half hours, and a rock does not go off shift. Psalm 62 never makes the keeping conditional on the sleeping, and what God has written He does not withdraw at the end of a hard week. And it is not these sentences settling the room: it is the Holy Spirit, carrying what God already said into a dark He was already sitting in.

Then look at where the psalm lands. I shall not be moved. Not I shall not feel it. Moved is a word about position, not about weather. That ground is under you tonight, and you are held to it while you sleep and while you do not, because Scripture says He only is your rock, and only is a small word doing enormous work: there is no second thing to get right first. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead keeps you there when you have no grip left of your own.

Then a plain thing, said warmly. What you carry out of a shift deserves somewhere to go that is not your pillow. A debrief, your supervision, occupational health, a counselor, a therapist who knows what your work looks like: those are good and ordinary, the way a splint is. Walking through that door is not a lack of trust in God. It is what a person does with a real load.

You are not the weak one on the team for needing it, either. The word never once calls a tired body a faithless one, and the Spirit who lives in you is not embarrassed by anything you carry home.

Your head is not attacking you at midnight. It is doing the only thing it knows to do with material it was never built to be handed in that quantity: sorting, filing, trying to put a day somewhere it will fit. That is not sin, and it is not the last word on the room either.

And you were kept on every one of those nights. Not because you managed them, and not because you prayed correctly before the light went off. Scripture says He neither slumbers nor sleeps, so there has never been one night of your life without a witness, and His Spirit has been in every dark room you have ever lain awake in.