Rehearsing Tomorrow At Midnight

The boiler makes a noise at ten past twelve, and after that the house has nothing left to say.

There is the tick as the pipes cool in the wall behind the wardrobe. There is the fridge, which comes on and goes off on a rhythm you could set a watch by if you were the sort of person who lies there long enough to learn it. There is a car somewhere, and then not. And underneath all of it there is your own voice, at full volume, having a conversation with somebody who is currently asleep on the other side of town.

You have run it eleven times. You know it is eleven because at about the sixth you started keeping count, hoping the counting would embarrass you into stopping, and it did not.

Version one was reasonable. In version one you said the fair thing calmly and they heard it and it was fine. Version four they interrupted, so you built a better opening. Version seven they said the thing they always say, the one that goes under your ribs, and you had an answer ready this time and it was a good one. Version nine you were magnificent. Version eleven you are just angry, and the anger has nowhere to go, because the person is asleep and the conversation is tomorrow at half past ten and nothing you are doing right now is happening in the world.

Here is the strange part, and you have noticed it before and never quite let yourself look at it.

Not one of the eleven has made you readier. If anything you are less ready than you were at eleven o'clock, because you have now rehearsed being wounded eleven times and your body has believed it every time. You are lying there braced for a thing that has not occurred, and your shoulders know it, and your jaw knows it, and in the morning you will be tired in a way that has nothing to do with hours.

Whatever your version of it is, a difficult phone call, a meeting, a sentence you have to say to somebody you love, the mechanism is the same. It rehearses because it is trying to keep you safe. It is doing its best. It is just very bad at its job, because it has confused running the scene with being prepared for it, and those are not the same thing.

Stay with me. I am going to ask you to do one small thing, and you can do all of it with your eyes shut.

You are on a watch nobody assigned you

Here is what is actually happening in that bed, and it is worth naming properly.

You have put yourself on guard duty. Somewhere in you there is a conviction, not a thought exactly, more a posture, that if you stop turning this over, you will be caught out. So you keep the watch. You stay up on the wall in the dark, walking the perimeter of a day that has not started, on the grounds that the walking is what keeps the thing from going badly.

And here is the trouble with that watch. It has no relief. Nobody is coming to take over at two. There is no bell. You will stand there until exhaustion pulls you off the wall, and then you will call that sleep, and then you will do it again tomorrow night about a different conversation.

The Word has one sentence for this and it is short enough to carry.

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 word only. It is doing all the work and it is the last word you expect.

David is not saying he sleeps because the situation is safe. He wrote that psalm in trouble, with people against him and nothing resolved. He is saying that God alone is the thing that makes him dwell in safety, which means the safety was never being generated by his vigilance in the first place. He is not the wall. He never was.

Which means your rehearsing has not been protecting anything. I know that is a hard sentence, and I want you to feel what is underneath it, because it is not a rebuke, it is a discharge. If the safety was never coming from the watch, then coming off the watch does not put you in danger. You are not choosing between being ready and being at peace. You have been standing guard at a post that was already covered.

And Jesus says the same thing about tomorrow, and He says it more plainly than anyone is comfortable with. Do not be anxious for tomorrow, He says, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own trouble is enough for that day. That is not a scolding. It is a portion. Tomorrow has been issued its own grace, and it has not been released yet, and that is precisely why tonight feels unequal to it. You are trying to face half past ten in the morning on grace that was measured out for midnight.

You do not have tomorrow's supply because you are not in tomorrow. When you get there, so will it.