He Wakes at the Same Hour Every Night

Twenty past two.

He does not need to look. He wakes and lies there and knows what the clock says before he turns his head, and then he turns his head anyway, and it says twenty past two.

That was the hour. Not roughly. That hour.

So he lies still and he listens to the house.

The fridge comes on and runs and stops. The boiler ticks twice as something in it cools. There is a sound the stairs make with nobody on them, which every house makes and which he never once noticed in eleven years of living in this one. A car goes along the main road, and he tracks it the whole way, and then it is gone and there is nothing.

He is not thinking about anything in particular. He is listening.

He is waiting for the house to make a sound.

Not that sound. Any sound. The next one, whatever the next one turns out to be, and his whole body is set up like a man holding a door that nobody is pushing on.

Around four he gives up and goes down. Kettle on, and the noise of it filling is far too loud, so he catches it at the last second before it clicks. He stands in the kitchen in the dark with both hands round a cup, and his shoulders are up somewhere near his ears, and they have been for weeks, and he does not notice that either.

And then the light starts. Over the fence, along the top of next door's roof, into the corner of the window above the sink. He stands there with the cup, and it goes gold on the worktop, and he thinks: the worst of it has passed, hasn't it.

And then he thinks: so why am I standing here like this.

That is you.

Maybe not twenty past two. Maybe ten to five. Maybe you sleep right through and you do the bracing in the middle of the afternoon, in a meeting, with your hands under the table.

The acute part is behind you. People have stopped asking. Somebody said the word "recovery" to you recently and you smiled at them. And your body has not been told, and it is still up on the balls of its feet, waiting for the next one.

Two things before we go any further. That bracing is not a failure of faith, and nobody is disappointed in you at twenty past two. And I am not going to explain any of it to you, because I do not know why it happened, and a reason I made up would be worse company than none.

A man who slept in the middle of a coup

Psalm 3 has a heading on it, and the heading matters. It says it was written when David fled from Absalom his son.

That is not a bad week at work. His own son has taken the kingdom, the city has gone over, and he is out in open country with people around him saying out loud that God has finished with him.

And in the middle of that, this.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Notice what he does not say. He does not say the danger has passed. The very next verse has him talking about ten thousands of people set against him round about, in the present tense, still there, still round about.

So verse five is not a report from safety. It is a report from a man who is still in it and who got a night's sleep in the middle of it and is telling you who to credit for that.

You are being kept through nights that have not been made safe first, and that is exactly the kind of keeping the psalm is describing. Psalm 3:5 sits two lines away from an army that has not gone anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence like that off the page and puts it under a man at twenty past two.

And look at the other half of it, because this is the part for you specifically.

I awaked.

The waking is in the verse. He does not credit God with the sleeping and then handle the waking on his own. Both are in the sentence, and both are put down to the same account.

You were sustained through the waking as much as through the sleeping, and the hour you open your eyes has never once been outside His keeping. What is written puts the whole night in God's hands, the unconscious part and the staring-at-the-ceiling part alike, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in that room at that hour every time it has come round.

The bracing is your body doing its job

Let me say this clearly, because I suspect somebody has hinted otherwise.

Your body learned something at that hour. It was paying attention, the way a body is supposed to, and it filed it, and now it wakes you up at the time it happened because that is what a working alarm system does after a real event. That is not weak faith. It is not a spiritual problem. It is a nervous system doing precisely what it was made to do, in a person it is trying to protect.

And if it goes on and on, a doctor is a good and ordinary thing, and so is sitting down with somebody whose actual job this is. That is not a lesser road. It is the same as going to the man who knows about knees.

You are not being asked to stop bracing by an act of will, and nothing in you is being graded this morning. Psalm 3 has a man surrounded and afraid and writing about it in a song that made it into the book, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over your bed with a clipboard at two in the morning.

I am also not going to tell you the worst has passed. You said that in the kitchen, not me. You might be right and you might be early, and either way I am not the one who gets to sign it off, and I am not going to pretend otherwise so that this page can end tidily.

You have an anchor that holds whether or not there is another blow, and that is the whole reason it is called an anchor. The written word calls that hope an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, which is language about the holding and not a forecast about the weather, and His Spirit is the one who makes a held man out of a braced one without ever telling him off for bracing.