In Peace I Will Lay Me Down

He shut the laptop at eleven. It is ten past one.

Nothing has happened in those two hours. He is not working. He is lying on a sofa in the dark with his eyes open while his head continues to do exactly what it was doing at half past ten, except worse, because now there is nothing in front of it and it has to reconstruct everything from memory.

He has tried the things. He has read that you should not look at a screen, so he does not. He has read about winding down. He has a routine and the routine is fine and his head does not care about the routine.

Here is what it is actually doing, if you watched it honestly. It is holding the thing. Not solving it, holding it, the way you hold a door shut. There is an unfinished piece of work and some part of him has concluded that if he lets go of it entirely, something will move.

He knows that is not how it works. Knowing is not the mechanism.

Ten past one, and he has to be up at half past six, and the arithmetic of that is doing its own damage on top.

You may know that ceiling. A closed laptop and a head that did not close, and a routine that works on everybody except you.

Why he could lie down

Here is a line about sleep, and the reason attached to it is the part worth having.

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 doing everything. He does not say: I can sleep because things are in hand. He does not say: I have done what I can, and the rest will keep. He says the safety comes from one source and one only, and he is naming which.

Read the psalm before that verse and it is not a peaceful situation. There are people against him, there is pressure, and there is a phrase about lying on your bed and being still. This is not a man whose day went well.

And he lies down anyway, because the thing that keeps him is not the state of the work.

You are kept by Someone who does not stop when your day does, and that is the reason a person can lie down. Psalm 4:8 puts the safety in the LORD only rather than in the day being finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact a man can lie down on at ten past one.

Now let me name what your head is actually doing, because you have nearly got it.

It is holding a door. Some part of you has taken responsibility for keeping the situation stable overnight, and holding requires staying awake, and so it stays awake. That is not a discipline problem and it is not a failure of technique, and it will not respond to a better routine, because a routine is not the thing that is happening.

The question that would actually reach it is: who is holding this at two in the morning if I am not.

You are not the one holding it overnight, and you never have been. The written word says thou only makest me dwell in safety, and the Holy Spirit does not go off duty at eleven when the laptop shuts.

The honest half, and it matters here. Some of what is on you may genuinely be more than one person should carry, and I cannot see your situation and I am not going to hand you an instruction about it. I am not going to tell you to change your hours, because you may not be able to, and a message that assumes you can is written for somebody else.

And your tiredness is not poor discipline. That idea gets handed to people like you constantly and it is false and it is cruel.

There is a part only you can do, and it is small enough to do lying down. You name the thing you are holding. Out loud, once. And then you say who is awake.