Checking The Locks Again

Four.

That is the count tonight. Four times down the stairs, and she knows it is four because she has started keeping the number, which she is aware is not a good sign but is at least accurate.

The first one is normal. Everybody does the first one. The second is where it stops being normal, and she knew that even as she was doing it, hand already out for the handle, telling herself she would just feel it once and go up. The third she did not decide to do. She was upstairs and then she was downstairs and the stairs in between are not in the record.

The fourth is the one that gets her, because on the fourth she stood in the hall with her hand flat on the wood of the door and she could see the bolt, she could see it, drawn across, and her eyes were reporting a locked door and something underneath her eyes was not accepting the report.

That is the part that is difficult to say out loud without it sounding mad. She does not think the door is open. She knows the door is locked. Her body has simply not been informed.

So she goes back up. She lies down. The house makes the noise it makes when the heating goes off, the one that sounds like a footstep if you want it to, and she is instantly awake in a way she was not awake ten seconds ago, running the ground floor in her head, window by window, back door, front door, the little one over the sink that does not really open.

Her husband sleeps through all of it. He has always slept through all of it. She does not hold that against him. She has never once woken him and said I need you to know I have been down there four times, because saying it would make it a thing, and while it is not a thing it is just her, going down the stairs.

And you might not have stairs. You might have a rearview mirror, or a phone you check for the fourth time to see that the alarm is definitely set, or the hob you already turned off twice. Whatever your version, it is the same architecture: your eyes have reported safety and your body has declined to sign for it.

There is a watch being kept over that house tonight, and it is not yours. Let me tell you whose it is.

Somebody is already awake in every room

There is a short line at the end of the fourth psalm, written by a man who had genuine enemies and genuine reason to be alert, and it is one of the last things he says before he goes to sleep.

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

Two small words carry the whole thing. You alone.

He is not saying the doors do not matter. Lock your door. Bolt it. Check it once, the way a sensible person checks a thing once. Nothing in this message is against ordinary care, and if the checking has got hold of your nights in a way you cannot shift, there is real help for that and getting it is a good and wise thing, not a failure of trust.

What he is saying is that the safety of that house was never resting on his vigilance, and the proof is that he can go unconscious for eight hours and it is still there in the morning.

Think about what sleep actually is. Every night, every person alive lies down and stops defending themselves entirely. You cannot watch and sleep. The two things do not overlap. So sleep is not a break from the watch. Sleep is the daily, physical, unavoidable admission that somebody else has to be keeping this, because you are about to be no use to anybody for seven hours.

And there is a line in the psalms about the God who keeps that says He neither slumbers nor sleeps, which is not poetry about how impressive He is. It is practical information about the handover. There is no hour of the night when the keeping stops. There is no gap where it is briefly you again.

So here is the thing I want to say to the part of you that goes down the stairs the fourth time.

You are not doing this because you have a weak faith. You are doing it because a body that has been frightened at some point learns to keep checking, and a body cannot be argued with. You cannot reason it into standing down and you should not be told to. It does not respond to lectures. It responds to being given a different job.

So we are not going to argue with it tonight. We are going to give it something else to do, and something else to hear.

And notice the order in that verse, because it is the opposite of the way you have been doing it. He does not say I will make myself feel safe and then lie down. He lies down first. In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for You alone. The lying down comes before the feeling. He puts himself horizontal on the strength of who is keeping the house, not on the strength of how settled his chest is.

You do not have to feel safe to be kept. You have to be kept, and you are.