You Have Already Run Tomorrow Twice

There is a strip of orange on the ceiling, about the width of a hand, cast by the streetlamp through the gap where the curtains do not quite meet.

She knows that strip better than she knows the faces of some of her relatives. She knows it goes slightly paler around half past four in summer. She knows it flickers for about a second whenever the lamp outside is on its way to failing, and that the council took eleven weeks to come the last time.

Ten past three.

And she is off.

The meeting at eleven, first. Two versions, because she always does two. The one where she says the thing calmly and it lands, and then the other one, the honest one, the one where her voice goes and she can hear herself getting it wrong. Then her son, and the conversation she has been putting off, run through twice as well, once the way she means it and once the way it will actually go.

None of this is happening. Every one of these people is asleep. The meeting is eight hours away and the conversation may never take place at all, and she is lying in the dark under a strip of orange light doing full dress rehearsals for the whole of it.

She has done this since she was about twenty-nine.

And in the winter, lying there, something arrived that had never occurred to her in all those years. Not a comfort. A piece of arithmetic.

She could not remember one single time when tomorrow had gone the way she rehearsed it. Not once. Not one version, out of thousands, over more than a decade, had ever turned out to be the one that happened. Sometimes the day was better. Sometimes it was worse in a way she had not thought of. It was never, ever, the rehearsal.

Eleven years of dress rehearsals for a play that has never once been performed.

She lay there and she did not feel clever about noticing it. She felt tired, and she felt sad for the woman who had been doing it.

That is you, under the orange strip.

There may be no gap in your curtains. But you are awake, and it is later than you want it to be, and you have already run tomorrow twice, and part of you believes that if you can just run it enough times you will find the version where you are ready.

Before anything else, hear me on this. What you are doing is not a failure of faith. It is not a spiritual problem and it is not a fault in you. Your mind is doing something it learned to do, probably a long time ago, and it learned it in order to keep you safe. It is not working, but it is not wickedness, and nobody is disappointed in you at ten past three.

Somebody wrote a line for exactly this hour

There is a song written by a man who was in real danger at the time. Not a quiet man in a settled life. Somebody with something genuinely coming.

This is how he ends it.

In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Listen to the two verbs, because he separates them on purpose, and anyone who has been awake at this hour knows exactly why. Lie down, and sleep. They are not the same act. You can be lying down for four hours and not have slept for a minute of it, and he knows that, and he claims peace for both halves.

Then listen to the small word that carries the whole line. Alone.

You alone make me dwell in safety.

He is not saying he has made himself safe and is now able to rest. He is saying the opposite, and it is the opposite of what you have been trying to do since you were twenty-nine. The safety is not being manufactured in that bed. It is not the product of the rehearsals, it never was, and it does not increase by one degree with the third run through the meeting at eleven.

And here is the part that ought to loosen something in your chest. Hear where this is coming from, because it matters: I am not handing you a thought of my own at ten past three. This is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a written line into a dark room and makes it weigh something.

He does the keeping while you are unconscious.

Think about what sleep actually is. It is the one thing a person cannot do while supervising anything. You cannot sleep and keep watch. Sleep is the daily, ordinary, physical admission that somebody else has the night, and God made you a creature who has to do it, every day, for a third of your life, which means He built the surrender into the design.

So the rehearsals are not keeping you safe, beloved. They are keeping you awake. And the safety they were meant to produce has been in place the whole time, held by Someone who does not need you conscious to hold it. That is not my encouragement to you. That is Psalm 4 standing in your own bedroom, and His Spirit is the One making it true of you while you lie there reading it.

You do not have to solve tomorrow at ten past three. You are not equipped to at this hour and you were never meant to be. The morning has its own light and its own strength in it, and none of that has been issued to you yet, because it is not the morning.