It Went In The Middle Of The Night

You woke up because something stopped.

That is the strange part and it is worth saying first, because people who have not had it do not believe it. A house has a hum. The hum is a compressor and a fan and a small motor somewhere doing the one thing it does, and a person sleeping upstairs does not hear it at all.

Until it stops. And then the silence goes through the floor like a sound.

So you came down. Barefoot, because you did not think about shoes, and the tiles were cold in the way tiles are at that hour, and the little light on the front was off, and you stood there in a dark kitchen with your hand flat on the top of a machine that was not doing anything.

And then the two in the morning part started.

Because at two in the morning things are a certain size, and that size is not their real size. At two in the morning the machine is the beginning of a run of things. At two in the morning you can see the whole of next month and all of it is going wrong. At two in the morning the word you use in your head for your own situation is a word you would never use in daylight.

You are standing in a dark kitchen at two in the morning and not at the end of anything, and a night hour has never once been a reliable place to decide what is true.

I want to spend this whole article there, at two, in the dark, with cold feet. Not skip forward to the practical part. There is time for that and the practical part will still be there at eight.

Joy cometh in the morning

There is a line in the psalms that is usually quoted at half its length, and the half that gets left off is the half that helps at two in the morning.

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, King James Version)

Weeping may endure for a night. Not should not. Not if you had more faith it would not. May endure. It is allowed. It is accounted for. The psalm builds the night into the shape of the thing and does not treat it as a failure in the person having it.

You are having a night that Scripture already made room for, and a hard hour in the dark has never once been evidence that something has gone wrong in you. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a dark kitchen at two with somebody who cannot sleep, and Psalm 30:5 says weeping may endure for a night without one word of correction attached.

Then: but joy cometh in the morning.

Now be careful with that, because it is often preached as a promise about circumstances, and it is not that. It does not say the machine works in the morning. It does not say the money is there in the morning. I am not going to tell you either of those things and neither does the verse.

What it says is about timing. The night has a boundary. It ends. And on the far side of that boundary the whole thing is a different size, and the psalm treats that change of size as something God does rather than something you manufacture by thinking harder at two.

You are inside a stretch that comes with an edge on it, and a night has never once been given the authority to go on being the size it is now. The written word puts a morning on the far side of it as a plain fact, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries a person across the hours to reach it.

And notice the ordering in that verse, because the ordering is the mercy.

His anger endureth but a moment. In his favor is life. The weeping comes third in the sentence, after the favor, held inside it rather than instead of it. The night is not happening outside of God's kindness. It is happening within it, on the inside, surrounded.

You are inside His favor while you are standing in the dark, and a night spent in a cold kitchen has never once been a night spent outside of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man inside the first clause while he is living in the second, and Psalm 30:5 puts the favor first in the sentence and the weeping afterward.

Everything is bigger at two

Here is the practical half, and it is about a thing your body is doing rather than a thing your character is doing.

At two in the morning nobody is thinking badly. A brain is simply running low on everything a brain runs on, in a dark room, with no other people in it, and no sound, and no daylight to give anything its ordinary proportions.

That is not a moral condition. It is a set of physical circumstances, and those circumstances produce the same result in almost everybody, and the result is that everything is bigger and every future is worse.

You are being handed a false scale by an hour and not a true one by God, and a judgment formed at two in the morning has never once been the judgment you would form at eight. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from signing anything at that hour, and the written word treats the night as a stretch with an end rather than a source of reliable information.

So here is the rule, and I want it plain enough to remember while standing on cold tiles.

Nothing gets decided tonight. Not what it costs. Not whether to repair it. Not what this means about the year. Not whether you are the kind of person things like this happen to. All of that is unavailable at two, and every one of those questions is still going to be there in daylight, and in daylight they will be a normal size.

You have permission to leave every question where it is until the light comes, and a decision postponed until morning has never once been a decision avoided. Psalm 30:5 gives the night its own borders and puts the morning on the other side, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a house together in the hours in between.

Unplug it if it needs unplugging. Open a window if the smell needs it. Put a towel down if there is water. Those are three things a body can do without a mind agreeing to anything.

Then go back to bed. Not to sleep, necessarily. Just back. Horizontal, warm, in a dark room that is not this room.