My Presence Shall Go With Thee

She has not had an uninterrupted night since March and it is not going to change soon.

There is nothing wrong. Nobody is ill. It is simply the shape of her house at the moment: two people who need things at night, at unpredictable intervals, for reasons that are entirely legitimate and that nobody is doing on purpose.

She is not resentful. She would want that said, and it is true, and she has checked.

What she is, is finished. Not dramatically. It shows up in small places: she cannot follow a conversation with more than two threads in it, she has started putting things in the wrong cupboards, and last week she cried at something on the radio that was not sad.

And every piece of advice she has ever read about rest assumes something she does not have, which is control over the night.

Protect your sleep. Have a wind down. Keep a consistent bedtime. All of it is written for somebody whose night belongs to them.

Hers does not. It has not for months and it will not for months more, and there is no version of the next year in which she gets to decide when she is asleep.

You may know that house. Nights that are not yours to protect, and a whole literature of advice written for people whose nights are.

What He offered instead of ease

Here is an exchange, and what God offers in it is not what was asked for.

Moses has just been told to take a whole nation into a wilderness. It is an enormous ask and the conditions are impossible and he says so.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.Exodus 33:14

My presence shall go with thee.

Notice the order. The presence comes first, and it is a presence in the going, not instead of the going. God does not say: I will make this easier. He does not say: you will not have to do it. He says: I am coming with you into it, and rest is what comes out of that.

That is the shape you need, because your situation is not going to become easier this year and any promise that it will would be a lie.

You are accompanied into the broken nights rather than rescued out of them, and the rest is attached to the accompanying. Exodus 33:14 puts the presence into the going and then names rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about two in the morning in an ordinary house.

Now let me be careful about what I am not doing, because you have read a shelf of things that assumed you had a choice.

I am not going to give you a routine. I am not going to tell you to protect anything, because you cannot, and instructions you cannot follow become a second failure on top of a real tiredness.

And your tiredness is not a discipline problem. You are being woken by other people. That is not a habit and it is not a mindset.

You are not failing at rest, and there is nothing here for you to organize better. The written word puts the promise into the middle of an impossible assignment, and the Holy Spirit is not among those handing you a schedule.

The honest half. You will be woken tonight, probably more than once, and I have nothing that changes that. And if this has gone on long enough to be affecting your body seriously, please say so to a doctor, plainly, and let somebody help. That is a practical step about a real thing.

There is a part only you can do and it takes ten seconds and can be done in the dark. Before the night starts, you say one sentence about who is going with you into it. Not to make it shorter. So that it is not a night you go into alone.