He Giveth His Beloved Sleep

Three o'clock. It is always about three.

He does not wake up and then think about it. That is the part he cannot get anybody to understand. The thought is already there when he arrives. He surfaces into it, the way you surface into a room somebody was already talking in.

He is sixty two and this has been going on since the spring.

It is never a new thought. It is the same one: a thing at work, not a crisis, entirely ordinary, that is not finished and is not going to be finished for a while and that he has no useful action available on at three in the morning.

Sometimes he lies there. Sometimes he comes down and puts the kettle on, and stands in the kitchen with one light on, and does not open anything, because he learned early that opening something makes it worse.

He has stopped telling his wife. She worries and there is nothing she can do and the worrying costs her sleep too.

What has started to frighten him a little, and he has not said it to anybody, is that he cannot remember what it was like to sleep through. He knows he used to. He cannot get at the memory of it.

You may know that hour. Not a new fear each night. The same one, waiting for you, already going before you get there.

The gift at the end of the verse

Here is a verse about working hours, and the last three words are the point.

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

For so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Read the first half carefully, because it is easily misheard. Rising early and sitting up late are described as vain, and the word does not mean sinful. It means empty of result. It is the same word used about chasing wind. He is not scolding anybody for working hard, he is saying that adding hours does not produce the thing you are adding them for. The Holy Spirit is not scolding you for the hours either.

And then: he giveth. Sleep is placed in the category of gift.

Not achievement. Not the reward for having finished. Not a thing you produce by managing yourself well. Given, to His beloved, which is a word about affection rather than performance.

You are one of His beloved and sleep is a thing He gives rather than a thing you earn by finishing. Psalm 127:2 puts sleep in the giving and calls the extra hours empty of result, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of sixty two stop treating rest as something he is failing at.

Now let me say what I am not going to do, because you have had six months of people trying.

I am not going to give you a routine. You have a routine. I am not going to tell you what to do at three, or how to breathe, or what to think about instead. Anybody who wakes at three has been given all of that already and it has become one more thing that does not work.

And I am not going to suggest that your waking is poor discipline or a lack of trust. It is not. Bodies wake. Yours has learned an hour and it will unlearn it slowly or it will not.

You are held in the hour you cannot get out of, and the holding does not depend on you getting back to sleep. The written word gives sleep as a gift to the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is present in a kitchen at three with a man who is not going to sleep tonight.

The honest half. You may be awake again tomorrow at three. I am not promising you a night. And if this has run for months and is taking your days as well as your nights, tell your doctor, plainly. That is a sensible thing about a real thing, and it is not a spiritual shortfall.

There is a part only you can do and it is deliberately not a technique. You stand up, make something warm, and say one sentence. And you do not open anything.