Two Touches in Eleven Minutes

He has been on this pitch for eleven minutes and he has touched the ball twice.

The floodlights are on, the surface is wet, and there are ten of them out here on a Wednesday, which is supposed to be the one hour of his week that nothing can reach him. Somebody rolls it into the space in front of him and he sees it late. Somebody plays it again and he does not see it at all, and it runs out for a throw, and one of the lads gives him a look that is not unkind.

He is not here. He has not been here since Monday night.

The thing that will not stop is small. It is not even a problem yet. It is a possibility, something that might be wrong somewhere in what he handed over, and his head has been walking round it and round it since Monday, the way a tongue keeps going back to a tooth.

He got into bed on Monday at eleven. His head kept going until two. He has done four nights of that now, and none of it produced a single new idea, which is the part that would annoy him if he had the energy to be annoyed.

And you know this, because you have your own version of it, and you would not call it worry if somebody asked you. You would call it thinking. Being responsible. What a person who cares about their work does. It follows you into the shower, into other people's sentences, into the middle of your own child telling you about her day. It goes to bed with you and it stays up later than you do.

This is not a discipline problem

Let me clear something out of the way before anything else, because this has probably been filed away, quietly, under a personal failing.

It is not that you switch off badly. There is no switch. Nobody was issued one, and the people who look as though they have got one are mostly standing further from the thing than you. A mind that keeps working on a problem after the room has gone dark is a mind doing exactly what it was built to do, and it is the same faculty that makes you good at this in the first place. It does not have a setting for eleven at night.

So there is no plan coming in this article. No wind down routine, no rule about screens, no sentence to say to anybody at work, and no schedule, because you may well be on call and unable to keep one anyway.

You are not being marked down tonight, and you were not being marked down at two on Monday morning. That is not me being generous with you; the written word never treats an exhausted person as a slacker, and it is His Spirit, not a technique, who does the settling in a head that will not stop on its own.

Somebody is already awake over this

Here is the only thing that has ever actually worked on this, and it is not a method. It is a fact about who is up.

He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

That is not poetry about God being generally nice. It is a sentence about a night watch, and it says the watch is covered. Somebody is on the wall. Somebody is looking down the road at the thing you have been staring at since Monday, and He was looking at it before you noticed it, and He will be looking at it while you are unconscious with your mouth open.

You are kept tonight by Someone who is already awake over the exact thing you cannot stop thinking about. Scripture says He does not so much as doze, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land as relief in a person rather than as a nice idea about God.

Two people awake all night over one problem is not twice the cover. It is one of them wasted.

About the bread of anxious toil

There is another line, and I want to hand it to you carefully, because in the wrong hands it becomes a stick.

The psalm says it is in vain to rise early and sit up late eating the bread of anxious toil, and then says God gives sleep to the one He loves. Read badly, that becomes: good Christians go to bed on time, and your four bad nights are a spiritual report card.

That is not what it says. It is not against the early rising or the late sitting; farmers and night workers and people on call have always done both, and Scripture never once scolds them for it. It is against the bread. The anxious toil. The extra load a person carries on top of the actual work, made entirely of rehearsal.

You have permission to put the anxious part down while the work itself stays exactly where it is. The word separates those two things deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can lift one out of a person without taking the other, which is a surgery no amount of self talk has ever managed.

And if sleep does not come tonight, that is not a verdict either. He gives it as a gift and never as a wage, and a wakeful night has never once meant somebody was outside His love.

If you cannot turn the phone off

Some of you cannot. The phone stays on, the rota says what it says, and there is no version of tonight where anybody could call you unreachable.

Then this is for you exactly as it is: the difference is not whether the phone is on. It is whether you carry the whole thing while it is on.

Being reachable is a job. Carrying it is a choice nobody actually assigned you, and it is the part that follows you onto a five-a-side pitch on a Wednesday and takes your two touches off you.

You are able to be on call and not on watch, and that is yours right now rather than after a better week. Scripture puts the keeping of you in God's hands and not in your attention, and His Spirit holds what you set down in the gap between the phone ringing and not ringing.