The Argument At Four In The Morning

The refrigerator kicks on and that is what wakes you, and the stove clock says four eleven, and you are already partway into it before your feet hit the floor.

You come down and you do not turn the big light on. You stand at the counter in the dark with the dish towel over your shoulder because you picked it up without meaning to, and you start the case.

You have argued it so many times you no longer need the opening. It goes straight to the evidence. There is the woman on the hill with the sick husband, who does everything you do and does it on four hours and does not complain about it. There is the one at church with the four children and the job in town. There is your own mother, who buried two and never once sat down in the daytime.

And then the charge, which is always the same charge. What exactly do you have to be this tired about.

You go through it. You add up your week and you find it light. You find the whole year light. Nothing on your list would look like anything if you read it out to somebody, and that is the finding you were after, and you reach it again at about four thirty the way you reached it last night and the night before.

Then you rule against yourself. You always rule against yourself. And having ruled, you put the coffee on at five and you go out and do the day on no sleep, carrying the same tiredness you just decided you had no right to, plus the verdict.

Here is the part nobody says out loud, and it is the reason for this page.

The tiredness is real, and it would be survivable.

It is the court that is killing you.

You have been holding session every night at four in the morning for longer than you can remember, and every session costs you the hours that would have been the rest, and then the exhaustion goes up, and the higher it goes the harder the charge is to answer, so you convene again the next night with worse evidence.

That is not a hard season. That is a wheel, and it is turning in your kitchen in the dark.

The Case Is Most Of What Is Drowning You

Let me say the plain thing first, standing right there at the counter with you.

You are allowed to be this tired. Not once you have justified it, and not once your year measures up against the woman on the hill. Right now, at four eleven, without a defense filed. Psalm 131:2 has a soul calmed and quieted like a weaned child leaning on its mother, and it puts no test in front of the quiet, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the quieting while the refrigerator hums behind you.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.Psalm 131:2

Stay on the picture a second, because most people run past it. A weaned child is not a fed child. A weaned child is a child who has quit fighting for the thing. It is not lying against its mother because it got what it was after; it is lying there because she is who she is, and the wanting has gone quiet, and there is nothing left to argue about.

That is the state His word describes, and it is a state of rest that is not on the far side of a verdict. You are being handed that, tonight, in the dark, with the towel still over your shoulder, and the Spirit of God is the one holding it out.

Now hear exactly what going still means and exactly what it does not, because on this one I would rather be blunt than lovely. Dropping the case is not the same as giving up. It does not mean stopping your medicine. It does not mean leaving the program, skipping the appointment, canceling the counselor, or turning away the woman who keeps showing up with soup and will not take a hint. Every one of those is a rope somebody threw into the water, and a person who lets go of a rope has not gone still, she has gone under. What ends tonight is the case. Only the case.

And if four in the morning has ever carried thoughts of ending your life, or of simply not waking up, then that gets said out loud tonight to one living human being. Your doctor, your pastor, somebody down the road who would come. In the United States, 988 takes a call or a text at any hour, and four in the morning is very much an hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or a local crisis line will pick up. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and picking up the phone is obedience, not defeat.

So back to the courtroom, because there is one question in it worth asking. Who is the prosecutor.

It is not God. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and the Spirit of God does not open a file at four in the morning and start reading your week back to you against somebody else's. It is not the woman on the hill, who has never given your sleep a thought. There is one person in that kitchen at four eleven, and she is doing all the voices.

You have been running a comparison nobody ever asked you to run. Nothing in Scripture weighs one soul's tiredness against another soul's, and the Spirit of God does not grade a load before He carries it. Jesus said come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and there is no adjective in front of laden, no minimum, no proof of hardship required at the door.

That is the whole trick of it, and it is an old one. Keep a tired person busy proving she is tired enough and she will never once lie down.

You were never the one holding this up. Psalm 127:2 says He gives to His beloved sleep, and the giving is the verb and the sleep is the gift, and the Holy Spirit has been standing in that dark kitchen every night, waiting for court to adjourn so He can hand you the thing you were arguing for a right to.