Worse At The Same Hour Every Night

He starts putting the house to bed at a quarter past nine, and nobody who visits has ever worked out why.

He carries his mug through to the kitchen while there is still tea in it. He puts the chain on the door early. He sets the tablets and the glass of water on the shelf by the bed, and he lays the phone on the arm of the chair where he can reach it without turning. He does all of this at a quarter past nine, briskly, like a man closing a shop.

Because at twenty to ten it comes.

Not every night at exactly twenty to ten. But near enough that he could set a clock by it, and he has stopped mentioning that to anyone, because the last two people he told said something kind and slightly frightened and changed the subject. So now he simply gets ready. By twenty to ten the house has to already be sorted, the lights already off downstairs, the door already locked, because from twenty to ten until sometime after midnight he is not going to be a man who can do things. He is going to be a man in a chair with his jaw set, breathing in through the nose the way he taught himself, waiting.

And the worst part is not the pain. He would tell you that himself, and it takes people by surprise.

The worst part is the quarter past nine. The bracing. The part of the evening he loses in advance, every single day, watching the clock come round to it, feeling his shoulders start to climb before anything has actually happened yet. The pain takes three hours. The waiting for it takes the whole day.

You know this hour. Maybe yours is four in the afternoon, or the moment you lie flat, or the second hour after you sit down and your back finds out you sat down. It is not new pain, and that is exactly what makes it heavy. It is old pain with a timetable. And somewhere along the way you stopped saying anything about it, because there is nothing new to say, and people who love you have already been sad about it as many times as they have in them.

You are safe here. I am not going to be surprised, and I am not going to be sad at you, and I am not going to tell you a single thing you have already tried.

Somebody is awake at that hour

Let me tell you what I think is actually happening at a quarter past nine, and it is not what you think.

You are not bracing against pain. You have had this pain for a long time and you are, whether you know it or not, extremely good at having it. What you are bracing against is being alone in it. That is a different thing and it needs a different answer.

Because that hour is a lonely hour by design. Everyone else in the house is winding down or already asleep. Nobody is going to phone. There is no appointment to get to, nothing to distract you, no reason to be brave in front of anyone. It is you and your body and the ceiling, and the specific ache underneath the physical one is the thought that nobody in the world is awake and thinking about this with you.

So look at what the psalm actually says, and notice it is not a promise about pain at all.

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

Read it again slowly, because it is one of those sentences where the second half is the whole thing. He does not sleep. Not dozing. Not on call somewhere else. Not needing to be woken by an urgent enough prayer. Awake, at twenty to ten, and at eleven, and at ten past one when you finally get the shallow kind of sleep that does not count.

There was a reason the psalmist had to say that twice in one breath. In the world he wrote in, gods were understood to sleep, and if you needed one you had to shout. He is saying: not this One. There is no hour of your night that catches Him off duty. The keeping does not lapse. Nobody has to wake Him on your behalf, and you have never once been in that chair with nobody paying attention.

And here is where I want to be very careful with you, because this is the place where people get hurt by good sermons.

I am not telling you that saying the right words tonight will lift this. I do not know what God is going to do with your body and neither does anyone else who tells you they do. What I can tell you honestly is that healing is real, that it is His, that it is being received and not merely waited for, and that receiving it is not a performance you can fail. Your faith is not a lever. You are not being tested at twenty to ten.

And whatever anyone has ever implied to you: keep taking what your doctor gave you. Keep the appointment, take the tablets, tell the nurse the truth about the pain score. The care sitting on your shelf is God's provision as much as anything in this message is, and there is nothing spiritual about going without it.