The Chest That Tightens At Three

The rain started at three, the way it does.

Not heavy. The other kind, the kind that arrives without being announced and sets itself against the window in small handfuls, and then stops, and then starts again, so that a person lying flat on their back in the dark keeps waiting for it to settle into something and it never does.

He was already awake. He is always already awake. There is no dream to blame it on and no noise that did it, because the hour itself is the alarm now, and his body has learned the time the way a farm dog learns an engine. The chest goes first. A hand closing slowly around the middle of him. Then the breath moves up and gets shallow and busy, and sits high in the throat where it is no use to anybody. Then the counting starts: hours until the alarm, days until the thing, money, the conversation he handled badly in March.

He does not put the light on. He has learned that the light makes it worse, because the light makes it official, and a man sitting up with a lamp on at three in the morning has admitted something he would rather not admit.

So he lies still and rides it, and the rain comes and goes, and the room is very large and very small at the same time.

Beloved, I think you are lying in that same room right now. Your eyes may not even be open. Good. Leave them shut. You do not have to do anything with this except hear it.

Small enough to take in the dark

I am not going to hand you a program at this hour. You could not do it, and I would not ask.

At three in the morning nothing large is possible. You cannot pray for forty minutes. You cannot work out what is wrong with your life. You cannot make a decision, and every decision made at this hour is wrong anyway, which is a mercy if you think about it, because it means the whole of it can wait until the kettle.

So this is small. It is meant to be small. One thing that is true, that holds, and that needs nothing from you.

First, though, hear the thing I most need you to have, and I want it said before any teaching at all: what is happening in your chest is not a report card on your faith.

It is not. Not a failure, not a lapse, not evidence of anything spiritual gone wrong in you. A body that has been on guard for a long time keeps its own hours, and it does not consult your beliefs before it does it. Some of the most God soaked people I could name have sat up at three with their hearts going like a bird in a box. There is no shame in this room tonight. I have taken it out and shut the door on it.

What He can see from where He is

Here is your one true thing.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11 to 12

Stay with that second half. Not the darkness is nearly light. Not He manages in the dark. Both alike. There is no adjustment for Him to make. Nothing in your room at this hour is dim to God, nothing is hidden, nothing is worse than it looked at nine o'clock, and nothing has been reclassified by the night into the shape your body currently thinks it is.

The dark is not a place He gets to eventually. It is not a place He tolerates. It is simply not dark where He is looking, and He is looking right now, at a person lying flat with a tight chest, and He can see the whole of it plainly and He has not moved.

That is why three in the morning lies so effectively. It is not that the problems get bigger at three. It is that your ability to see gets smaller, and a mind that cannot see the edges of a thing assumes there are none. Every trouble looks infinite in the dark. That is the dark talking, not the trouble.

And you are not being asked to see. You are being told who is seeing for you.