Dreading The Alarm Already

It makes a small sound when it is set. Three soft ascending notes, about a second and a half long, and then the screen goes dark.

Ten forty at night. Six fifteen in the morning. And that sound is the starting pistol for the whole thing.

Because the moment his thumb comes off the screen he is doing the arithmetic. Seven hours thirty five if he goes straight to sleep, which he will not, so call it seven, and if it takes twenty minutes then six forty, and that is not enough for the day he has got, and now he is lying in the dark having a small argument with a number.

Then the day itself comes in and sits on his chest. Not the whole day, just the two bits of it that have teeth. The conversation at eleven. The thing that has to be sent by four and is not written. He runs the conversation. He runs it again with a better opening line. He runs the version where it goes badly and rehearses what he would say, and his jaw is tight, and he is having a difficult meeting with a man who is currently asleep three miles away and knows nothing about any of this.

Somewhere around one in the morning he checks the time, which is always a mistake, and the arithmetic starts again from the new number, and it is worse now, and the tiredness that will make tomorrow hard is being manufactured right here in this bed by the effort of getting ready for it.

He is not awake because of tonight. Nothing is wrong with tonight. Tonight is warm and quiet and the house is fine.

He is awake because of a morning that does not exist yet.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you are lying there right now with a small ascending sound still somewhere in your head, spending a perfectly good night guarding a day that has not arrived. And if somebody is reading this to you in the dark, keep your eyes closed. There is nothing here you need to look at, nothing to write down, and nothing to get up for. You can take this lying down, which is the only sensible way to take it.

Somebody is already keeping this watch

There is a short psalm, a walking song, that has one of the most quietly devastating lines in the whole book for people like us.

It starts with a house, and a city. Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor for nothing. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake for nothing.

Then comes the line.

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Hear what it is actually describing, because it is not describing laziness and it is not scolding hard work.

Rise up early and go late to rest. That is a person adding hours at both ends of the day. Getting up before they need to and going to bed after they should, and doing it out of a specific fear: that if they stop, it will not hold. And the phrase in the middle is one of the great pieces of writing in the Hebrew Bible. The bread of anxious toil. Bread eaten standing up. Bread eaten with one eye on the door. Food that goes in and does not feed anybody, because the person eating it is not actually at the table, they are already at tomorrow.

That is your night. You are eating the bread of anxious toil at one in the morning, lying down, with your eyes shut. Working, in bed, on a day that has not happened, for a wage that does not exist.

And the psalm does not answer that with a rebuke. It answers it with a picture of who is on the wall.

Because look at the watchman line again. The watchman is not told to stop watching. Cities need watchmen and mornings need people who show up. What he is told is that the city is being watched by Somebody else, and that this changes what his own watching is for. There is a first watch, and it is God's, and it has been kept over that city all night whether the man on the wall was awake or not.

You have been keeping a second watch. A watch nobody asked you to keep, over a morning that already has a Keeper. That is why it never feels like enough, and that is why finishing it is impossible: you cannot successfully guard a day you cannot reach.

And then, at the end of the verse, the gift, and it is worth noticing that it is a gift and not an instruction. He does not say sleep, then. He says He gives to His beloved sleep. Sleep is handed to you like bread, by name, as a beloved one and not as a worker who has earned a break. It is the same shape as everything else God does in the dark: given, while you are doing nothing, to someone who could not have made it themselves.

And there is one more mercy folded into it, straight out of the desert.

Nobody was given tomorrow's bread tonight. Not once, not for anybody, not even the most faithful person in that camp. Anyone who gathered ahead found it spoiled by morning. So the reason you have nothing tonight for the conversation at eleven is not that God has withheld it. It is that it has not been issued yet, because it is not needed yet, and it will be there in the morning on the ground where it always is.

You are not underprepared. You are early.