The Fridge Door at Four in the Morning

The refrigerator in the house on Bellview Road hums in B flat, and he has lived here eleven years and never once noticed it until tonight.

It is ten past four. He is standing in his own kitchen in his socks with the fridge door wide open and the cold light on his face and his chest. The door has been open long enough that the little bulb has gone warm against the back of his hand.

Inside there is half a lemon in plastic wrap. A carton of milk with three days left on it. A casserole in a dish that belongs to somebody at church, with a strip of masking tape across the lid and a name written on the tape in marker. Two eggs in the door. A jar of something.

He is not hungry. That is the strange part of it. He has been standing here a while now and he does not want one single item on those shelves, and he is not going to eat, and he is still not closing the door.

He came down because lying still had turned into a job. Upstairs the bed had become a place where his own heartbeat was the loudest thing in the county. So he came down for a glass of water he has not poured, and he opened this door, because opening a door is a thing a man can do at four in the morning that looks like a reason to be out of bed.

Through the window over the sink it is black. Not one light anywhere on Bellview Road. The furnace kicks on under the floor. Somewhere up the hill a dog starts and then thinks better of it.

Eight hours ago, he thinks, I did not know.

Eight hours ago he was in the truck with the window down and the radio going and a plan for Saturday.

And now he is standing in the cold light with his hand on a door, and the milk has three days on it, which is further ahead than he can currently think.

That is you.

Maybe not the fridge. Maybe the back step. Maybe the bathroom floor with the fan running because the fan is a noise and the noise helps. Maybe the kitchen table with the phone face down on it and every light in the house burning. But it was somewhere around four, and it was the first night, and you stood there.

Two things before we go one more step, and I want them said out loud, because I build for a living and I do not leave anything load bearing unsaid.

The first. Standing at that door at four in the morning is not a failure of faith. It is not a symptom of a thin foundation or a shallow prayer life. It is what a body does on the night the ground moves, and there is not a saint in Scripture who did it better.

The second. I am not going to explain this to you. Not tonight. Not further down. I do not know why it happened, and neither does anybody who has told you they do. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I have not brought you one.

Nobody up there is asleep

Here is the sentence I want under you for the rest of this night, and it is a short one.

Somebody is awake.

The psalm this comes from was a walking song. People sang it going up a hard road toward Jerusalem, a road with heights on it and loose footing and a real chance of turning an ankle in the dark, and the song they sang on it says this:

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.Psalm 121:3

Read what it claims and what it does not. It does not say the road is smooth. It does not say nothing is coming up the valley. The word under moved is the word for a footing giving way, a slip, and the answer the song gives to that slip is not a promise of easy ground. You are being kept at this minute by Someone who never once closed His eyes while yours would not close. That is not my sentiment. Psalm 121:3 puts the keeping outside the traveler and inside the Keeper, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold real in a man standing in a kitchen, rather than the amount of composure he can find at four in the morning.

I have poured concrete in November and sat up with it overnight in the cold. You do not help a slab cure. You keep the blankets on it and you stay. You have a Keeper who is awake at ten past four, and He was awake in this kitchen before ever you came down the stairs. The written word says plainly that He does not so much as doze, and His Spirit is the one holding what your hands are in no condition to hold tonight.

What this psalm does not promise

I want to be careful with you here, because this verse gets handed to people like a guarantee, and it is not one.

The song does not say the traveler never stumbles. It says the Keeper does not sleep. Those are two different claims and only one of them is being made.

So I am not telling you how this turns out. I do not know. Anybody who does tell you is guessing in a confident voice.

What I am telling you is who has been on watch since the phone rang. You were not alone in that room when the news landed, and you are not alone in this one now. Scripture calls Him the keeper of Israel and then says twice inside three lines that He neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Spirit of God has been in this house all night whether or not one thing in your chest registered it.

There is a difference between being steady and being kept. Steady is something a man would have to produce. Kept is something being done to him. You are held tonight by a hold you are not the one maintaining. What is written puts the Keeper in the active voice and the traveler in the passive one, and the Holy Spirit is called the Helper for the plain reason that helping is the work He came to do.