Three In The Morning And Nobody To Ring

First, the sound.

The fridge, which you have never once noticed in the daytime, is doing its low grinding thing in the next room. Somewhere out the back a boiler fires and settles. A car goes past and the sound arrives and leaves and takes with it the small hope that it was going to stop outside. And under all of it, closest of all, is your own heart in your own ear against the pillow, going far too fast for a person who is lying completely still.

That is the whole world at three in the morning. Those four sounds.

She is lying on her side with her eyes open in the dark, and she has already done the thing. She has already gone through the names. Her sister, who has to be up at six. The friend who said any time, absolutely any time, which was true when she said it in a bright kitchen in the afternoon and is a different sentence at three. The number she stopped using two years ago. She has scrolled the whole list twice, and every name has a reason attached to it, and the reasons are all some version of not at this hour, not again, not me.

So she puts it down, and now it is worse, because now the list has been checked and come back empty and that is a fact rather than a fear.

And her chest is tight, and has been for an hour, and the tightness has begun feeding on itself the way it does, where the fear of the fear is bigger than whatever started it. She cannot remember now what started it. It does not matter. It is here.

If that is you tonight, then I want you to stop reading in the sense of working, and just let this be a voice in the room. You do not have to hold anything. You do not have to concentrate. You are not behind on anything and you have not failed at anything, least of all at faith. Panic is not unbelief. It is a body doing an old, loud, frightened job it was never told it could stand down from. There is no shame in this room.

You are safe here. Let us go very slowly.

One true thing, small enough to hold

Before anything else, I want to say something practical, because at this hour a real human voice matters more than a beautiful sentence, and I would rather be useful to you than moving.

If you are frightened for your own safety tonight, or if the thought has come that the people you love would be better off without you, please reach a person now. In the United States you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and someone awake will answer. If you are somewhere else, call your local emergency number or your country's crisis line; if you do not know it, phone emergency services and they will get you to the right people. And whatever the hour says, there is a person in your life who would want to be woken for this. Talking to me is good. It is not enough. You deserve a human being beside you tonight, and reaching for one is not weakness and it is not drama. It is the bravest and most sensible thing available at three in the morning.

Now. Whether or not tonight is that kind of night, here is the small thing I want to put in your hand.

You have been trying to hold something big. You have been trying to hold the whole situation, the whole future, the whole question of whether you can keep doing this. Put it down. At three in the morning you are not equipped to carry the shape of your life, and nobody is, and that is not a defect in you.

Hold one thing instead. One sentence, the size of a breath.

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, 12

Listen to what the man is doing there. He is not being brave. He is doing exactly what you did with the list of names: he is going through the possibilities of being unreachable. Surely the dark covers me. Surely here, at least, nobody can find me. He is talking himself into the very thing you are lying there believing.

And then he stops, and he says: no. The dark hides nothing from You.

The night shines like the day. Not for you. You cannot see a thing tonight and you are not going to be able to. It shines like the day to Him. Which means the room you are lying in, that you experience as empty, is not empty. It has never been empty. The list came back with no names on it, and that was true, and it was not the whole truth, because the One who is actually here does not appear on any list and does not have to be woken and cannot be phoned too late.

The darkness and the light are both alike to Him. Three in the morning is not a worse hour for God. It is the same hour. He is exactly as present, exactly as attentive, exactly as unhurried at three as He is at three in the afternoon, and He does not think less of you for being frightened at one of them.