Something to Hold at Four in the Morning

At four in the morning a ward is not quiet, it is only lower. The machines keep their small opinions. Somebody two bays down is asleep with the light on and somebody else is not asleep at all. The floor was mopped hours ago and the smell of it is the smell of the middle of the night, and she has learned that four is the hour the body decides it has been awake for a hundred years.

She does her round. Bay one, bay two, the man in bay four who has stopped asking what time it is because the answer never helps. She writes her numbers. She fills a jug. She stands for a moment at the window at the end of the corridor, where the car park lights make their orange pools on the wet tarmac, and she thinks about God, and what she feels is warmth.

That is the honest word for it. Warmth. Like a radiator in the next room with the door shut: she knows the house is heated, she could not tell you where the boiler is. She was brought up in it, more or less. She prays in the car on the way in. She would say yes straight away if anybody asked whether she believed, and she would mean it all the way down.

It is not doubt. It is a lack of edges.

Then at ten past four the daughter comes out of bay three, the one who has been there since Tuesday sleeping upright in a chair, and stands beside her at the window with a plastic cup of the terrible tea. She is not being clever. She is a person at four in the morning. She says, do you believe in God?

And she says, yes. I do.

And the daughter says, why?

There is a pause the length of the corridor.

Because she has nothing exact. She has warmth. She has a general sense, running thirty years now, that God is good and that things somehow hold, and at four in the morning a general sense is a coat with no buttons. She wants to put something into this woman's hands with a shape to it. One verse she could say straight through without reaching for a phone. One thing that happened, with a month attached to it, that she could not talk herself out of afterwards. She reaches, and her hand closes on air, and she says something warm instead. The daughter says thank you, and means that too, and goes back in to the chair.

She stays at the window a while. The orange pools. The lift going up to nowhere by itself. And the thought she has been holding at arm's length for years walks right up and stands in front of her: if I had needed that just now, for myself, I would not have had it either.

A man who was awake at the same hour

There is a psalm written by somebody who was standing exactly where she is standing, and it is not a gentle one. Asaph says his hand was stretched out in the night and did not go slack, and his soul refused to be comforted, and that God was holding his eyelids open. Then he asks the questions people only ask at four: is His mercy gone for ever, has He forgotten to be gracious, is the promise finished.

He does not tidy that up. It sits in the middle of the psalm with the ink still wet.

And then he does the thing this whole message is about. He says, this is my infirmity, and I will remember. Not I will feel better. Not I will wait for the warmth to come back. Remember, which is a decision made with the mind about specific material, at an hour when nothing whatsoever is glowing.

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.Psalm 77:11

You are not a thin believer. You are an unfurnished one, and those are not the same thing at all. I say that from the written record rather than from kindness: Psalm 77:11 puts remembering in the imperative, which means God expects His works to be reachable at the hour His people cannot feel a thing, and the Holy Spirit who moved Asaph to write that line down is the same Spirit standing beside you now with the room half empty and no shame in it. Warmth was never the problem. Warmth with nothing under it is.

He did not reach for a feeling, he reached for a sea

Watch what Asaph actually picks up. He goes to the oldest and hardest and most specific thing his nation had: the water. A night, a wind, a seabed, a whole people walking through on ground that had no business being dry.

Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.Psalm 77:19, 20

He does not reach for the general goodness of God. He reaches for an event. A place you could stand. A thing that happened whether or not anybody in Israel woke up that morning feeling spiritual about it. That is the whole method, and it is not sophisticated: when the inside goes quiet, go and get something from outside yourself that has edges.

Right now, as you read this, you have a record behind you that is not made of moods. Scripture keeps a ledger of what God did rather than how anyone felt about it, and His Spirit is the One who brings those specifics back up at the moment they are needed, which is exactly what He is doing in you as your eyes move down this page. Your file is not empty. It is unread.

Two things, and both of them have edges

This is what the ark held, and it is not decoration. Inside it: the covenant, what God swore, in writing. And the record, what God did, kept where it could be found. Two things, and neither one of them is a feeling.

So take the two now, in your own hands, and make them specific.

The promise first, by chapter and verse, because a promise you cannot quote is a promise you cannot hold. Here is one and it is an oath, not an arrangement:

I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

Read the grammar of that. There is no clause in it about you. It is not a deal with two signatures and a section about what happens if one party goes quiet for a season. It is God binding Himself, and He did the binding while He knew everything about you that you are afraid of.

You have been inside that oath the entire time you thought you were only warm. It is written and it was written before you read it, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw a sentence God has already put His name to because the person reading it is tired at four in the morning. The oath is not a mood, and it never once depended on yours.