Three In The Morning And Still At It

Three in the morning was a real place for eleven months.

Not a symptom. A place. She would settle around two and then be awake again at four, and the hour in between was yours, and you spent it at the bench in the next room with the door open so you could hear.

You made a good deal in that year. Small things, because small things could be put down instantly.

And nobody in the family knew, because the whole thing happened in an hour that nobody else was awake for.

She died in the March.

And you are still awake at three.

That is the sentence you have been going round with. There is no reason to be up now. The door does not need to be open. Nobody in this house needs anything at four in the morning, and yet the eyes open at ten to three the way they did for eleven months, and there you are.

And you get up and go to the bench, because what else is a man going to do.

Here is what I want to say before anything else, and I want it said carefully because I think there are people who would call this a problem to be fixed.

That hour is not a disorder. It is a habit worn into a man by love.

Eleven months of getting up for somebody does not come out of a body in six. And the bench is not the wrong response to being awake. It is the response that got you through the year.

In the night watches

There is a line in a psalm about the night that does not treat the night as an enemy, which is rarer than it should be.

David is in a dry place, and the psalm is full of longing, and then this arrives almost in passing.

When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. (Psalm 63:6, King James Version)

In the night watches.

The night watches were the divisions of the night, the hours somebody had to be awake through, and the psalm treats them as a location rather than as a problem. He is not asking to sleep. He is describing what he does in the hours he is awake for.

You are awake in an hour that Scripture treats as a place rather than as a fault, and Psalm 63:6 names the night watches without one word about getting back to sleep. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient line about a dry night and lays it on a workbench in a house at ten to three.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not resolve the night. He does not fall asleep at the end of it. The psalm holds the plain fact that a man is awake and that God is in the hour with him.

You have company in the specific hour, and it is already settled in the written word that the night watches are somewhere God is met rather than somewhere a person is stranded. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man standing at a bench in a house where everybody else is asleep.

The night is not the thing to fix

Now let me say what I am not going to do here.

I am not going to try to get you back to sleep. Somebody else may need to and that is a different conversation with a different person. What I am not willing to do is treat eleven months of getting up for a dying woman as a fault in you that needs correcting.

And I am not going to tell you what the three o'clock means now. Whether it is grief, or the body's habit, or your hands wanting the year back. I do not know and neither do you and neither of us has to.

You have company in the specific hour, and Psalm 63:6 treats the night watches as somewhere God is met rather than somewhere a man is stranded. The Holy Spirit is the one who is in that hour without asking it to end.

What I want to add is one thing, and it is an addition rather than a replacement.

Make something in daylight this week.

Not instead of the night. The night can stay exactly as it is for as long as it stays. But at some point in the week, in the ordinary light, with the house awake, do twenty minutes at that bench.

You are allowed to keep the hour and add another one, and heaven has never once asked a grieving man to give up the thing that got him through. Psalm 63:6 puts the night watches and the remembering together without correcting either, and the Spirit of God is the one who adds rather than takes away.

And this: what came off that bench in eleven months is not a measure of anything, and neither is what comes off it now. Nobody is reading those objects, including God.

You have permission to work in the daylight without giving up the dark, and this is yours: the verse holds the night as a place and never as a state to be recovered from. It is written in Psalm 63:6 that he meditates in the night watches, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in both hours equally.

Twenty minutes in daylight

So here is the ask.

This week, at some point when it is light and people are up, go to that bench and do twenty minutes.

Same bench. Same kind of work. The only change is the hour and the fact that somebody in the house might walk past and see you.

That last part is not incidental. For eleven months this happened where nobody could see it, and it stayed private after, and privacy has quietly become part of the shape of it.

You are met in the daylight as well as in the dark, and it is already settled in Psalm 63:6 that the remembering and the night watches sit in one line. The Spirit of God is the one who adds an hour rather than taking one away.

It will feel wrong. Daylight work will not feel like the same activity, and you may find you cannot settle to it in the way you can at three. That is expected and it is not a failure of the exercise.

What you make will be poor, because the hour is unfamiliar even though the work is not. Leave it poor and leave it out on the bench.

And keep the night. If you are awake at three, go out. Nothing here is asking you to stop.

You are accompanied in both hours, and Psalm 63:6 is the ground under that. The written word puts a man remembering God in the divisions of the night without ever telling him to sleep, and the Spirit of God is present at a bench at ten past two in the afternoon as well as at three in the morning.