Awake With My Heart Already Running

Downstairs, the fridge clicks on and starts its low hum, the way it does about every twenty minutes all night long.

That is the only sound in the house.

And in the dark of an upstairs room your heart is going like you have just come up a flight of stairs at a run, and you have not moved, and you have not been anywhere, and there is nothing on the ceiling and nothing on the landing and nothing in the whole world outside this room that has changed since you lay down.

There was no dream. That is the part you cannot get past.

If there had been a dream you could hold it up and look at it and say, well, that is where it came from, and put it down. A dream would give you something to blame. Instead your body simply started up on its own, without asking, without warning, without so much as a reason it could show you, and your chest is tight, and your hands are cold, and your mouth has gone dry, and somewhere underneath all of that is the question that makes it worse.

What is wrong with me?

Then the second question, which is crueller than the first and comes in a quieter voice.

If I actually trusted God, would this be happening?

I want you to hear me, and you do not need to open your eyes to hear it. Let this be read to you. Stay exactly where you are.

That second question is a liar and it has been lying to people at this hour for a very long time. Your body running away with itself at three in the morning is not a verdict on your faith. It is not a report on your walk with God. It is not evidence of anything about your soul at all. A body can be terrified while a soul is anchored, and the fact that you are lying there frightened is not the smallest evidence against you.

You are not doing this wrong.

Small is not the same as weak

Here is the whole of what I am going to ask of you tonight, and it is not much, because not much is what you have got.

One true thing.

Not a Bible study. Not a plan for the morning. Not a decision about the thing you are dreading on Thursday. One true thing, small enough to be held by somebody lying flat in the dark with a heart going at a hundred and ten.

Here it is.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.Psalm 94:19

Listen to what that verse admits before it comforts anybody.

The multitude of my thoughts within me. The pile. The crowd. Not one worry, not a manageable list, but a swarm of them, at once, inside a man, in the dark. The man who wrote that was not calm. He does not get calm before God turns up. He does not tidy the crowd, or shrink it to a reasonable number, or get his breathing right, and then qualify for comfort.

The comfort arrives while the multitude is still in the room.

That is the shape of God, and it is worth your whole night. He is not standing at the end of your panic waiting for you to come out the other side so the two of you can have a proper conversation. He is in here. Now. At the loud part. He does not need the room quiet before He will come into it, and He does not think less of the man lying still with his hands cold.

And notice something else, because the God of the Bible has a habit that runs right through it. He feeds people in small amounts, daily, and He always has. Bread on the ground every morning, enough for the day, none of it able to be stockpiled. It was not that they were being kept short. It was that He wanted them coming back tomorrow, and He wanted them to find that today's was always there.

So one true thing at three in the morning is not a poor substitute for a real prayer. It is the portion for this hour. It is exactly the size God has been handing things out in since the beginning.

Now two plain things, said plainly, because I am not going to leave them out.

If the tightness in your chest is new, or different from the usual, or comes with pain down an arm or into your jaw, stop reading and ring the emergency number where you live. That is not a lack of faith. That is what the body was given a voice for.

And if there has been a thought in the last while about not being here any more, or about the people around you being better off without you, do not sit alone with that at this hour. In the United States call or text 988. Anywhere else, ring your local crisis line or your emergency number, and wake somebody in the house or ring one person who loves you. Being here with me is good. It is not enough, and you deserve a human being beside you tonight.