Half past two. She has been awake since about one.
The decision was made in a room she has never been in, by people she has met twice, and she found out about it in three sentences at the end of something else, and everybody around her absorbed it and moved on within about a day.
She has not moved on. It has been nine days.
She is not even sure it is a bad decision. That is the part that makes it so hard to put down. She can construct a version where it is reasonable, and she can construct a version where it is not, and she does not have anything like the information you would need to know which, and she keeps building both versions anyway, at half past two, on a Tuesday.
What she is actually doing, if you watched it from outside, is trying to make somebody else's decision correctly in her head so that she can stop being uneasy about it.
That is not going to work, because it was not hers to make and she does not have what she would need to make it, and so the process has no end. She has been running it for nine nights.
And there is a religious layer on top, which is that she feels she should have peace about it, and she does not, and now the not having peace has become a second thing to be awake about.
You may know that ceiling. Something decided a long way above you, that you cannot change and cannot properly assess, and a mind that will not stop trying to assess it anyway.
A king wrote this about his own limits
Here is one of the shortest psalms in the book, written by a man who had actual power, which is what makes the first line remarkable.
LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.Psalm 131:1
Neither do I exercise myself in great matters.
Exercise myself is a strong phrase. It means to work at something, to labor in it, to make it your business. And what he is refusing to labor in is the category of things that are above his own reach.
This is a king saying it. Not a person with no responsibility looking for permission to stay small. A man who could decide most things is drawing a line around what he will carry, and calling the things beyond it what they are: too high for me.
You are permitted to have a limit, and the permission is in the mouth of a man who could have claimed otherwise. Psalm 131:1 has him refusing to labor in matters too high, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put something down that was never in their hands to begin with.
I want to name what has actually been happening at half past two.
You have not been worrying, exactly. You have been working. Building both versions of a decision, over and over, looking for the one that would let you rest, and the reason it never arrives is not that you have not thought hard enough. It is that you do not have the information, and no amount of labor makes information appear.
You are not failing to work it out. You were never given what it takes to work it out. The written word calls those matters too high and treats stepping back from them as a good and holy act, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been keeping you up trying to settle them.
Now the honest half, because I will not flatten this.
Some things above you genuinely do have weight, and some of them will land on people, and being untroubled by everything is not holiness, it is anaesthesia. If you have a real and specific concern, take it to somebody wise who can see your actual situation. That is a proper thing to do and this cannot do it for you.
But there is an enormous difference between having a concern and running a simulation. One is a thing you can act on in daylight. The other is what happens at half past two and produces nothing at all except a tired woman.
And the psalm has a second half worth knowing about. He does not say he made himself stop caring. He says he quieted his soul, like a weaned child with its mother. Not a baby crying for what it needs. A child who is simply with someone and does not need anything right now. That is the picture, and it is what you are being offered.
You have been trying to make a decision you were never given.
Not out of arrogance. Out of unease, which is a much more understandable reason, and which is why nobody has been able to talk you out of it, including you.
You are inside your own size tonight, and your own size is a place God made and blessed. Scripture has a king refusing to labor in matters too high for him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who quiets a soul without requiring it to first solve everything above it.
So the decision stays where it was made, three levels up, in a room you have never been in. And you get to put the light out.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting up, in the small hours. The standing to speak them is yours in Christ, given to you rather than earned, which is why a woman who has not slept properly for nine nights can say them now with full footing. Scripture is the ground under every line, the Holy Spirit makes it live, and everything three levels above you is His to decide.
- Decision made in a room I have never been in, you are not mine to make at half past two. Scripture has a king refusing to labor in matters too high for him, and I have been awake nine nights trying to do the very thing he laid down.
- Second worry about not having peace, in the name of Jesus you go first. The written word quiets a soul like a weaned child, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked me to settle the whole thing before I am allowed to sleep.
- Lord, I am giving You what is above me and keeping what is actually mine. I thank You that Psalm 131:1 calls those matters too high and thinks none the less of a person for saying so, and I am naming both lists now and putting the light out.
Psalm 131:1
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