The Last Thing Before I Sleep

Freya prays at night. She has since she was small, and it is not a ritual she is going through; she means it and she has never stopped.

And then she puts the phone on the bedside table, and lies down, and somewhere in the next four minutes, in the dark, she picks it up again and looks.

It is not every night. It is most nights. The screen is much too bright for a dark room, and she squints at it, and she reads the figure, and nothing about it changes anything, and she puts it back down and goes to sleep and does not think about it again.

Except that she thought about it last Thursday, because she happened to notice the order. Prayer, lamp off, lying down, and then one more consultation, in the dark, with her eyes half shut.

She is thirty-one. She is not in any trouble and there is no crisis in that account. If you asked her what she trusts she would tell you God without hesitating, and she would be telling the truth, and the prayer four minutes earlier was a real prayer.

Ask her what gets the last word in that room, and the honest answer is a different answer, and she had never put those two answers side by side until Thursday.

Your version may be different. It might be that you do not look but that a figure is the last thing your mind runs through as you settle. It might be that there is something you consult after you have prayed, and that the consulting is what actually lets you sleep.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. The evidence here is order, and order can be observed without anybody having to confess a motive.

Something has been given the last word.

Nothing has to be wrong for something to be out of order

Let me say the freeing thing first, or you will spend this whole page defending yourself and hear none of it.

Looking is not sin. Knowing what you have is not sin. Being careful with what you are responsible for is not sin, and Scripture never once treats a person who keeps track of their own affairs as somebody of small faith. If you came here braced to be told that carefulness is faithlessness, put that down now. It is not true and this page will not say it.

The question is not whether you look. It is what gets the last word, and whether you ever chose it.

David writes one line about lying down, and everything is in the second half of it.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

For thou, Lord, only.

That word only is the whole verse. Not mainly. Not chiefly, with other things helping. He names one maker of safety and then excludes everything else from the job, in a psalm written by a man with a kingdom's worth of things he could reasonably have checked before bed.

And notice what the safety produces: I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep. The lying down and the sleeping are downstream of who is making the safety. He is not describing a technique for getting to sleep. He is describing what follows from a settled question about who holds the night.

You have a night that is being held by One. Not by a last consultation in the dark. The written word puts only in the middle of the sentence and leaves nothing else in the role, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman squinting at a bright screen in a dark room.

Now let me say something about the app, because it has done nothing wrong.

It is a tool. It is a good one and it does what it was built to do. Nothing here wants you to delete it or leave it in another room, and there is no rule coming about bedside tables. The trouble is not that you look. The trouble is that a tool has been given the last word, and a last word is a resting place, and a tool cannot hold one.

You are not being asked to become careless. The written word never scolds a person for knowing where they stand, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a woman who keeps track.

And now the part underneath, because this is not really about a screen.

The last thing consulted before sleep is the thing a person hands the night to. Four minutes after a real prayer, something else was quietly asked whether it was all right to sleep, and it answered, and the answer was accepted. Nothing dramatic happened. A job was simply done by the wrong thing.

You are not condemned by an order you never chose. Thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety, and the excluding is done by the verse rather than by you. The Holy Spirit has been in that dark room every one of those nights.