What It Would Take To Sleep

Verona has two numbers, and one of them is the one she would say out loud, and the other one is the one that runs the house.

The first one is reasonable. It is the figure she would name to a friend who asked, over a plate, what she was working toward. It is sensible, it is defensible, it is a figure you could take to anybody and they would nod, and it is genuinely what she thinks she needs.

The second one is bigger, and she found it at ten past four in the morning.

That is the hour it lives at. It does not come out during the day. During the day the first number is entirely convincing, and Verona is not deceiving anybody when she says it, and if you told her there was a second one she would frown and mean the frown.

But she woke at ten past four, the way she has woken at roughly that hour for about six years, and she lay there and ran the thing she runs, and at some point in the running a figure went past that was not the daytime one.

She sat up and put the light on and said, out loud, in an empty room: that is not what I tell people.

Now, here is what she saw next, and it is the reason this article exists.

The second number is not what she needs to be secure. She has been secure by the daytime figure for a while, and it changed nothing about the ten past four.

The second number is what it would take for her to sleep. Those are not the same question and she had never once separated them.

And when she looked at the second one properly, with the light on, she could see that it did not really have a top. It had a shape rather than a size: it was whatever amount would be enough that nothing could go wrong, and nothing going wrong is not a figure. It is a condition, and no account has ever produced it for anybody.

Now hear me before anybody starts on themselves.

Verona is not a liar. The daytime number is honestly meant and she has not been performing modesty for her friends. Both figures are hers. They just belong to two different questions and she has been answering one with the other for six years.

And nothing in this message is going to tell her that a woman who wakes at four lacks faith. That is a wicked thing to say to a tired person and it has been said to a great many of them. Waking at four is not a spiritual diagnosis. It is what a body does when something has been left running.

The problem is not the figure and it is not the sleeplessness.

The problem is that one has been asked to buy the other, and it has never once been able to.

You have your own version. There is a number you would say out loud and there is a number that governs your nights, and you probably found out just now, reading that, that they are not the same.

Nobody is calling you dishonest. You are honest in the daytime and you are honest at four in the morning; they are simply two different rooms.

The psalm is about the hours you are awake

There is a line in the Psalms that names this exact hour, and most people quote it wrong.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

He is not scolding early risers. This is not a verse about lie-ins and it is not about laziness. The bread of sorrows is the phrase to stop on, because it describes what a person is chewing at four in the morning, which is not work. Nobody is productive at four in the morning. What they are doing is worrying with their eyes open.

And the answer given is not worry less, which nobody has ever managed by being told to.

And you are not being told to try harder at anything tonight. The written word puts the sleep in the giving column rather than the earning one, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who hands a thing over, which is why no effort of yours has ever been the missing part.

The answer is that He gives sleep to His beloved. It is a gift, in the same sentence as the futility, and it is given rather than earned, which is exactly what makes it useless to work toward and possible to receive.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are His beloved, and that is settled. That is not my phrasing to be warm: the written word says it plainly of everyone in Christ, and the sleep in that verse is given to that person by that name, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes it land in a woman sitting up with the light on at ten past four.

And the sleep is on His account and never was on yours. The word puts it in the giving column, not the earning column, and the Spirit is the one who hands it over, which means no figure has ever been the wrong size for it. Every figure is the wrong currency for it.

Nobody is coming for either number

I want to be very plain, because this is the paragraph where a message like this starts telling somebody what to do with their savings, and I am not competent to and I will not.

I am not going to tell you what your figure should be. Not the daytime one and not the four in the morning one. I do not know your house, your family, what is coming, and naming somebody else's number from a page is meddling in a life I cannot see.

And I am not telling you to stop saving. Nothing in Scripture rebukes a woman for putting something aside, and plenty in Proverbs commends it.

And I am not going to promise you that nothing will go wrong. That is not mine to promise, nobody on this site will ever sell you that, and it is the exact promise the second number has been quietly making you for six years without ever being able to keep it.

The only thing being asked is that the two questions get separated, so that one of them stops being answered with the other.

And you are already kept while you sleep. Not once the figure is right: the word says I laid me down and slept; I awaked, for the LORD sustained me, and the sustaining is His verb in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true in a body at four in the morning rather than a nice thought at nine.