It Came When Things Were Fine

"But nothing's wrong."

"I know."

"No, love. I mean nothing is actually wrong. The job is fine. The children are fine. You said last week it was the best you had felt in two years."

"I know."

That was the whole conversation, in a kitchen, over two cups of tea going cold. Her sister was not being unkind. Her sister was being logical, and logic is a good tool that does not fit this lock.

Because eleven hours later it is three in the morning and she is sitting up in bed with her heart going like something trapped, and there is genuinely nothing wrong. She has run the audit already. Nobody is ill. Nothing is owed. There was no argument. The house is quiet and warm, the doors are locked, tomorrow is an ordinary Thursday with nothing worse in it than a supermarket run.

And her body has decided that she is in mortal danger.

That is the cruelty of it, and almost nobody says it out loud, because it sounds ungrateful. The bad seasons at least made sense. When the fear came during the bad year it had a job, it had a name, you could point at it and say that, obviously. You could tell somebody about it and watch them nod. But this arrives in a good week, with no story attached, and it takes the good week with it, and it leaves you sitting up at three in the morning quietly ashamed of yourself for ruining something that was finally going well.

So you start hunting. That is the next part, and you know it too. You go looking for the reason, because a fear with a reason can be argued with. You check the accounts. You reread a message from four days ago to see whether the tone was off. You inspect your own body for anything that might justify the alarm. You will take a real problem over an unexplained one, because at least a real problem can be worked.

And under the hunting there is a worse thought, the one you have never said to anybody. Maybe this is just what I am now.

She sits with her feet on the cold floor in the dark, one hand on her chest, and she cannot find anything to hold. So she stops hunting for a minute. And she says the only true thing available at that hour, out loud, in the dark, in a voice that shakes.

God, You are here.

The verse that was written for a night with nothing wrong in it

There is a line in the psalms that people quote in the middle of disasters, and it was not written for a disaster.

When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.Psalm 94:19

Look carefully at where the trouble is in that sentence. It is not the enemy at the gate. It is not the harvest failing. The trouble is within me. The Hebrew underneath it is the picture of a crowd of disquieting thoughts, a press of them, all inside one person, all at once.

Which means this verse was written for exactly your night. Not for the night the letter came. For the night nothing came, and everything inside you arrived anyway.

And it does not say when the cares of my heart are justified. It does not say when you have a good enough reason. It just says when they are many. The comfort is not held back until the fear passes an inspection. That is the whole point of the line, and it is why it has survived three thousand years in the mouths of people sitting up at three in the morning.

Now hear this next part slowly, because you may have been carrying its opposite for a long time. Your panic is not a failure of faith. It is not evidence that you did not pray enough, or trust enough, or believe correctly enough. A body has an alarm system, and an alarm that fires with nothing burning is a fault in the wiring, not a verdict on the soul. Nobody in Scripture is ever rebuked for having a nervous system.

Look at Elijah, one day after the greatest afternoon of his life. Fire had fallen. Everything had gone right. And the very next thing in the account is a man running for his life into a desert and lying down under a bush asking to die. There is no season so good that a body cannot come apart in it. And what heaven does about it is worth memorizing, because it is not a lecture. He is allowed to sleep. He is fed. He is allowed to sleep again. Only then does anyone talk to him, and when the voice finally comes it is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. It is thin and quiet and low, and it arrives underneath the fear rather than shouting over it.

That is how He comes at three in the morning. Not as a raid. As a presence in the room that was already there before you sat up.

You do not need a large dose at this hour. Nothing large is possible at this hour. You need one thing that is true, small enough to hold in a shaking hand, and true whether or not you can feel it. Here it is: He is here, and you are not alone in this dark. That is not a technique and it is not positive thinking. It is a fact about the room you are sitting in.