The Night Before The Operation

Nothing after midnight.

That is the instruction, and it is the smallest one on the whole sheet, and it is the one that has taken the evening over.

Because at twenty to twelve a man is standing in his own kitchen in the dark with the fridge door open, not because he is hungry, but because in twenty minutes he will not be allowed to be, and there is something about being told you may not that turns a glass of water into an event. He shuts the fridge. He fills a glass anyway. He drinks about a third of it and pours the rest away, which makes no sense at all, and he knows it makes no sense, and he does it.

The bag has been by the front door since six. It has a phone charger in it and a book he is not going to read.

He goes up. He lies down. The house does the small settling noises it has done every night for nineteen years and tonight he can hear every one of them.

And here is the thing about this particular night, the thing that makes it different from every other bad night he has had.

He is not the one who does anything tomorrow.

That is what he cannot get comfortable with. All his life, when a thing was coming, he could get up early and prepare for it, or work harder at it, or take it apart and find out how it went together. Tomorrow he walks into a building and lies down and hands his own body over to people he has met for four minutes in total, and after that there is a stretch of hours he will not be present for.

There is no version of tomorrow where he is in charge of it. And so he is lying there tonight doing the only thing left that feels like being in charge, which is staying awake.

Now I am going to stop describing him.

Because you are the one who has to be there at seven. It might be an operation, or a scan that will say a thing you have half worked out already, or a procedure they have described to you in a calm voice using words you looked up afterwards and wish you had not.

Do not open your eyes for the rest of this. You do not need to read a word of it. Let it be read to you, lying exactly as you are.

You were never the one keeping the night

There is a short line from a man who wrote a lot of songs in the open air with people hunting him.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Listen to the small word in the middle of that, because everything is hanging off it.

Only.

He is not saying he feels safe. He is not saying the situation has improved, or that the men after him have gone home, or that he has taken sensible precautions and can now relax. He is saying that the keeping of him is done by one Person and by nobody else, including himself, and that this was already true on the nights he lay awake convinced he had to see to it personally.

So follow that into your own room tonight.

You have been keeping watch. That is what the staying awake is. It is not worry exactly, and it is not really thinking, because you are not solving anything and you know you are not. It is a man standing guard over a thing he cannot actually guard, because putting the rifle down feels like agreeing to whatever comes.

But hear this, and let it go all the way in: the watch was never yours.

It was not yours last Tuesday when you slept fine and nothing happened. It was not yours in all the years you were well and never gave it a thought. It has been His the whole time, and the only thing that has changed tonight is that you have found out, and finding out is not the same as it becoming true.

The One who keeps you does not sleep on the keeping. He was not planning to doze off around two and He is not depending on you to cover Him. There is no shift here that you are letting down by closing your eyes.

And there is one more thing in that line worth having tonight. He says lay me down in peace, and sleep. Not feel calm, and therefore sleep. Lying down is a thing a body does. Peace here is not a mood you have to work up before you are allowed to rest, and if it were, nobody in your position would ever qualify. You are permitted to lie down still frightened. Frightened people have been lying down in the safety of God for thousands of years, and it holds them just the same.

Two plain things, and then we will go on.

Go tomorrow. Whatever comes to you at three in the morning, keep the appointment, take what they have told you to take, and let the people God has put in that building do the work He has given them the hands for. Trusting God has never once meant not turning up.

And if the fear tonight has gone somewhere darker than fear, if there has been a thought about not being here, do not lie in the dark alone with that. In the United States call or text 988. Anywhere else, ring your local crisis line, or wake the person in the house, or ring one human being who loves you, right now. Being here with me is good. It is not enough tonight.