Awake Doing The Arithmetic

Four hundred and ten. Take off the ninety on the twenty second. Two hundred and sixty five if the hours hold, less if they do not.

That is the third time round tonight and it has not got better on any of them.

He does it in the dark with his eyes shut and his hands folded on his chest, flat on his back, absolutely still so as not to wake her. From the outside he looks like a man asleep. Inside, the same little machine is running the same little sum, the way you tongue a broken tooth, hoping this time it will come out differently. It never does. Arithmetic is the one honest thing in the house at half past one, and it will not lie to make him feel better.

So he starts again from the top. Four hundred and ten.

And here is the part that grinds. He is not lazy and he is not stupid. He has already done everything a person can do at this hour, which is nothing, because every office that could change any of these numbers is shut and dark and will be until Monday. There is no action available. There is only the sum, and a man lying very still doing it over and over in a room where nobody can help him.

Around two he gives up on the numbers and starts on the other thing, which is worse. The list of what it would mean. The conversations he would have to have. The face of somebody he loves when he says it out loud.

At some point he turns over and looks at the ceiling and says, to nobody, I just want to put it down.

Good. That is the truest sentence you have said all day, and there is somebody awake in that room who has been waiting for it.

Somebody in this house has to stay awake, and it is not you

Keep your eyes shut for this. There is nothing to look at and nothing to work out.

David wrote a short psalm that ends with one of the most extraordinary sentences a worried man ever said, and it matters enormously that he was not in a settled season when he wrote it. He is under pressure, people are talking about him, and the thing is not resolved. Nothing in the psalm gets fixed. And then he says this.

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

Hear the small word doing all the work in that line. Alone.

You alone. Not the balance. Not the hours holding up. Not the thing you are waiting to hear about. He is not saying his affairs were in order and therefore he slept well. He is saying the safety he lies down in comes from one source only, and that source is not a number and never was.

Because that is the quiet lie the arithmetic tells you at half past one. It tells you that when the sum finally comes out right, then you will be safe. So you keep running it, hunting for the version where it works, because you have made the number the keeper of your house. And a number is a terrible keeper. It cannot watch a door. It cannot hold anybody. It does not care about you at all.

Meanwhile the actual Keeper of your house has been awake this entire time.

That is not a figure of speech. Scripture says plainly that He who keeps you does not slumber and does not sleep. So at half past one there are two of you awake in that room, and only one of you is needed. He is not up because the situation is desperate. He is up because that is what He is like. He has never once fallen asleep on His watch and He is not tired now.

And you are not the second shift. That is the thing I want you to hear tonight with your eyes closed. You have been standing a watch that was never assigned to you, in a house where the real Watchman is already at the window, and the exhaustion you feel is the exhaustion of an unnecessary sentry.

Let me be plain about what I am not saying, because you deserve straight speech at this hour. I am not telling you the sum will come out. I am not telling you a check is coming or that Monday will be kind, and anyone who tells you they know that is telling you something they were not given. What I am telling you is what the psalm says. He alone makes you dwell in safety, and the safety is available tonight, unsolved.

You can put the day down without the day being finished. That is the whole gift of it.