Four in the Morning, Counting the Week

Four twelve. She knows because she has looked, which is the mistake, and now she knows exactly how long there is.

The house makes the noise it makes. Somewhere a pipe. The heating is not on yet.

And she is doing the thing. Not thinking. Counting. It has an order and she does not choose the order, it arrives in the same sequence every time she wakes at this hour, which has been most nights for about five weeks.

The letter about her mother's care assessment, which was not a refusal but was not a yes and used a phrase she has looked up twice. Her daughter, who was fine on the phone in a way that was not fine, and who ended the call slightly too quickly. The thing at work on Wednesday that is probably nothing and that she has now replayed eleven times, including the bit where she said the thing about the timescales.

Three. And she counts them, and then she counts them again in a different order in case that helps, and it does not.

Somebody said to her at church on Sunday, and it is written in the front of her Bible in her own handwriting from a conference in about two thousand and nine, that God's favor is for a lifetime.

Four seventeen.

And she lies there and thinks: I can find the weeping. The verse says weeping may endure for a night, and I could show you the night, I am in it, it is four seventeen. What I cannot find is the other half of that sentence, and I have been looking for five weeks.

If you have ever lain awake counting and found only the half of a verse that describes the trouble, you know that ceiling. And you know the thought: I am only ever in the first clause.

The word, quietly, before anything else

Let me sit at the end of the bed and be quiet with you for a moment, and then say one thing.

The trouble is not the three items. Three items is an ordinary week and you have had far worse and slept through them. The trouble is that you have been given a sentence about God's favor and you can only ever locate half of it, and at four in the morning that stops feeling like a verse and starts feeling like evidence about you.

So let me set the word straight first, because it has been doing a job it was not built for.

Blessed does not mean the week goes well. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a statement about where He is looking. It does not describe the letter, the phone call, or Wednesday.

Now the verse, and I want to read it whole, because the half you cannot find is not missing, it is at the end.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.Psalm 30:5

Look at the two units in it. A moment. And a lifetime, which is what in his favor is life actually means: His favor is the length of a life, and the hard thing is the length of a moment.

Then it does something you may not have noticed. It does not say the night is short. It says weeping may endure for a night, and endure is not a small word. It is a word for something you have to get through.

You are inside a verse that gives the night its full length and puts the favor at the length of your whole life. Psalm 30:5 sets a moment against a lifetime rather than a bad week against a good one, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm about proportions and makes it something a woman can hold at four seventeen without it going thin.

Morning is not the same as the alarm

Now the second half you cannot find, because I think you have been looking for it in the wrong place.

Joy cometh in the morning. You have been reading morning as the next morning. So every night that you get to seven o'clock and nothing has resolved, the verse fails again, and it has been failing for five weeks and you have started to keep score.

But the psalm is not a promise about the next twelve hours. David is writing about a season of his life, and he says a moment and a lifetime, which are the units he chose, and neither of those is a night's sleep. The morning in that verse is as long as the night was, and the night in his case had been a long one.

Which is not a lesser promise. It is a bigger one, and it is a slower one, and slower is harder at four in the morning, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

You have joy coming on the psalm's own timescale rather than on the alarm clock's, and the verse never once promised you the alarm clock. Psalm 30 measures in moments and lifetimes, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul names as the one in whom joy is a fruit rather than a mood, which is why what is coming is not the same thing as feeling better by breakfast.

And here is the thing about the counting itself. You do it in the same order every night. That is not thought, that is a groove, and a groove is not information. Nothing new has been added to your understanding of the letter, or your daughter, or Wednesday, in five weeks of four o'clocks. The counting has produced no fact.

You are not working anything out at this hour, and you were never required to. Scripture says He giveth his beloved sleep and puts the outcome in His hands rather than in the reviewing, and it is His Spirit who is called the Comforter, which is a role that has nothing to do with solving.

What I will not tell you at four in the morning

Let me be honest, because the hour deserves it.

I am not going to tell you the letter comes good, or that your daughter is fine, or that Wednesday was nothing. I do not know. And a woman lying awake does not need somebody else's optimism added to her list at four seventeen.

And I am not going to tell you that the five weeks are teaching you something, or that God is doing a work in the night. Perhaps He is. I do not know that either, and saying it confidently would be turning your ceiling into a lesson plan.

Both halves. The night is not the absence of His favor and it is not His favor in disguise.

You are favored and it is four in the morning, and both of those are true in this room right now. The written word puts the weeping and the favor in one verse without softening either, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to hold two true things at an hour when everything usually collapses into one.

One more thing, plainly. If the four o'clocks go on, or if the counting starts turning into something darker, tell your doctor. Say it out loud, in daylight, to somebody who can act. Five weeks of broken nights is a medical fact as well as a spiritual one and there is no faith anywhere in leaving it unsaid.