The switch clicks, and the meeting comes to order.
They do not meet during the day. They have tried, but there is too much noise, so they wait. They wait through the washing up and the last message and the brushing of teeth, and the second the room goes dark they are all sitting there in their chairs with their papers, ready, as though they have been waiting in the corridor the whole evening.
The chairman has excellent minutes. He has everything. He has the thing said at a wedding eleven years ago that nobody else in the world remembers. He has the tone somebody used on the phone this afternoon and he has three interpretations of it, and he would like to go through all three.
Item one, the day just finished. Item two, tomorrow. Item three, a conversation that has not happened yet, which they will now rehearse in full, both parts, several times, with variations.
And here is the thing about this meeting, and it is the whole point.
Nothing is ever decided.
Not once. It is a review body with no power to act. It cannot ring anybody, it cannot fix anything, it cannot even write anything down, and it goes on and on, and then somewhere around four the meeting simply adjourns because the person chairing it has finally lost consciousness, and no minutes are kept and no outcome is recorded, and the alarm goes off ninety minutes later.
You know this room. You are probably lying in it right now with your eyes shut and this being read to you, and you have your own item one.
I am not going to ask you to open your eyes. Leave them shut. Everything from here to the end can be done in the dark.
The dark did not bring this in with it
Let me take one accusation off you before we go any further, because you have almost certainly made it against yourself.
The dark is not doing this to you and you are not doing this to yourself.
All day long there is a covering noise. Traffic, screens, the kettle, other people's voices, the list of things to be got through. That noise is not peace, it is volume, and it has been sitting on top of everything you have not had time to feel. Then you turn the light off, and the world goes quieter than the inside of your head, and everything that was underneath the noise all along becomes audible.
The dark did not bring it in. The dark uncovered it. Those are completely different accusations and only one of them is true.
So this is not a discipline problem and it is not a failure of faith, and if you have lain there at two in the morning wondering what is wrong with your walk with God, I want that thought taken out of the room right now.
Now listen to a man who wrote about lying down while people were actively saying that his life had come to nothing.
I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8
Look at the small word in the middle, because everything hangs on it. Only.
Thou, LORD, only. Not the locks. Not the plan for tomorrow. Not the going over it once more to be sure. He is not saying he sleeps because everything has been resolved, because it plainly has not been, and the beginning of that same psalm is a man asking how long his honor will be turned into shame. He is saying he can lie down in the middle of an unresolved thing because the safety was never coming from his own vigilance in the first place.
Which means, plainly, that the review meeting is not what has been keeping you safe.
I know it feels like it. That is the trick of it. Somewhere in you there is a conviction that if you stop going over it you have dropped the guard, that the worry is a kind of duty, that somebody has to be awake in case. Beloved, look at who is actually on that watch.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4
He is not dozing. He is not going to miss the thing you are afraid of missing. And two of you do not need to be awake, because the post is already covered and it is covered by Somebody with far better eyes than yours and no need of sleep at all.
You are not the night watchman of your own life. You never were, and the strange, hard mercy of a night like this one is that you get to find that out lying flat on your back in the dark, where you can do absolutely nothing, which is exactly where you can finally receive something.
So we are going to adjourn it.
Not silence it, not argue it down, not win against it. Adjourn it, which is what somebody with authority does to a meeting that has run past its purpose.
And you have that authority, in the dark, in your pajamas, with your eyes closed. Not because you have got a grip on your thoughts tonight, and not because you have been particularly holy today. Because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the word you are about to speak is His, delegated to you and carried in His Name, and it does not need the lights on to work.
So speak to the mind. Speak to the dark. And then hand the whole night over to the One who is going to be awake through it regardless, and let Him keep what you have been trying to hold up.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud into the dark, or under your breath if there is somebody asleep beside you. It does not lose one gram of its weight for being whispered. You are in Christ, and the authority to adjourn this is not something you have to feel, it is His and it was given to you, and it is carried in His Name. And however He answers the things on tonight's agenda, the keeping of you was never on your shoulders.
- Mind, you are not in session tonight, and this meeting is adjourned in the name of Jesus. The Word of God says the Lord only makes me dwell in safety, so the keeping of this house was never once on your agenda.
- Dark, you are not my enemy and you brought none of this in with you, you only turned the volume down. The God who made the evening and the morning is in this room, and He has always done His best work in the quiet.
- Lord, You are awake, and I am not required to be. I thank You, because the One who keeps me neither slumbers nor sleeps, so I lie down and I am kept, and tonight is Yours and so am I.
Psalm 4:8
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