I Awaked For The Lord Sustained Me

Half past five, and he is up, and he has been up since about four.

He has stopped counting the months. It is not one thing keeping him awake, which is part of why it will not resolve: it is a rolling set of ordinary things, none of which is a crisis and all of which need him, and there is no single item to solve.

He is fifty six.

And what has started recently, and what he has not said to his wife, is that he has become frightened of what this is doing to him. Not tired of it. Frightened. He has noticed his temper is shorter with people he loves. He has noticed that he lost the thread twice in a conversation last week. He does not feel like the man he was two years ago and he cannot tell whether that is the sleep or whether it is fifty six.

The advice available is not useful. He cannot change the situation, and the people offering the advice are not in it.

So he gets up at half past five and puts the kettle on and does the day, and the day is fine, and then he does it again.

You may know that counter. Not a crisis. A rolling condition with no end in sight, and a private fear about what it is quietly doing to you.

Written by a man who should not have slept

Here is a verse, and the situation it was written in is what makes it worth anything.

This psalm has a heading. It says it was written when David fled from his own son, who was trying to kill him. That is not a metaphor and it was not a difficult week at work. He was in open country, his family had turned on him, and there were people actively hunting him.

And in the middle of that, he writes this.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Notice what he does not credit. He does not say: I slept because I did my breathing. He does not say I slept because the situation improved, because it had not. He gives one reason for waking up at all: the LORD sustained me.

Sustained. That is a word about being held up from underneath over a period, rather than rescued at a moment.

You are being sustained through this stretch, and the getting up at half past five has had somebody underneath it. Psalm 3:5 credits the waking to the LORD sustaining rather than to circumstances improving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names what has actually been holding a man up for months.

Now let me say the thing about your fear, because I think you are half right and it matters that I say which half.

You are right that this is costing you something. Broken sleep over months does affect temper and memory and the sense of being yourself, and I am not going to tell you that is imaginary or that you should be able to manage it better. It is real and it is physical and it is not a character failure.

Where the fear goes wrong is in the conclusion. You have started to read the effects as a description of what you are becoming permanently. They are the effects of a stretch. Stretches end. Not on a schedule anybody can promise, and not because you organize them better, but they are not the same thing as a new permanent self.

You have been held up through every one of these months and the holding did not depend on you sleeping well. The written word credits the waking to the sustaining, and the Holy Spirit is the reason a man of fifty six has got up every morning of this.

The honest half. I am not going to give you a routine, and I am not going to tell you to change anything, because you cannot and you have already been told by people who were not in it.

And I want to say one plain practical thing. If this has been going for months and is affecting your temper and your memory, tell your doctor about it. Not as a spiritual matter. As a body matter, which is what it is.

There is a part only you can do and it takes four seconds standing at a counter. When you wake, you name correctly what got you through the night. Not your resilience, which is what you have been silently crediting.