Everything Arranged, Awake at Three

Ten past three, give or take about eight minutes, four or five nights a week, for something like a year and a half.

He is not woken by anything. That is the strange part and it is the part he cannot explain to his wife, who is sympathetic and has run out of suggestions. There is no noise. He is not needing to get up for anything. He is simply, at ten past three, entirely awake, and has been for eighteen months.

Everything in his life is arranged. He would use that word himself. The work is settled and reasonably secure. The house is fine and there is no crisis in it. His children are grown and well and one of them rings every week. His marriage is not in trouble and he would say so without hesitating.

There is nothing wrong. He has looked. He has genuinely, seriously looked, at three in the morning, on many occasions, for something that would account for it, and there is nothing there.

And that is the actual difficulty, and nobody has ever said it back to him. It is not the waking. It is that there is no name for what is wrong, and a man with no name for it cannot ask anybody for help, because the first question anybody asks is what is going on, and he has no answer.

Anybody awake at that hour in an orderly life knows this exactly. And I want to say now that nothing in this article is going to suggest he is secretly unhappy, or that his settled life is a facade, or that if he looked harder he would find the real problem. That is a cheap move and it is usually wrong and it would leave him worse off.

A man asking his own soul a question

Let me put down a line and notice how strange it is that anybody wrote it.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.Psalm 42:5

He is asking himself a question and he does not have the answer. That is what is happening in that verse. A man is addressing his own interior as though it were somebody else in the room, because it is behaving like somebody else in the room, and he cannot account for it.

Which is a considerable relief to anybody at a kitchen table at three in the morning, because it means the state of being unable to name what is wrong is inside Scripture, given words, and it is not treated as a fault.

You are not required to be able to name it, and the psalm itself asks the question without producing an answer. That is not a soft word for a man in the eighteenth month of this. It is what is written in Psalm 42, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a kitchen before dawn. The life is arranged. The disquiet is real and it has a psalm.

And notice what he does next, because it is not what a modern reader expects. He does not diagnose himself. He does not resolve it. He tells his soul where to put its hope, and then says he will yet praise Him, which is a future he cannot currently feel.

You have somewhere to put hope that does not require you to first understand what is happening. Psalm 42:5 is the text this sits on, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old and unresolved psalm land in a man with a glass of water and a book he is not reading.

Nothing here says the life is a facade

Now the part this category exists for.

His settled life is not a lie and this article is not going to imply it is. A man with good work, a good marriage and children who ring is not therefore secretly miserable, and the fashionable idea that an ordered exterior must be concealing a wound is not knowledge, it is a genre.

And the second thing, which matters more: an arranged life does not make an ache smaller. Nobody gets to say to this man that plenty of people have it worse, and if anybody has said it, they were wrong, and he should be free to disregard it entirely.

Here is the honest position: something is going on that has no name yet, and it might have a physical cause, and it might have a spiritual one, and it might be both, and the not-knowing is itself the heaviest part.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

Notice the direction of that request. He is not asking to understand himself. He is asking Somebody else to do the searching, which is what a person prays when their own inspection has come up empty.

You were never the one required to find it, and the searching in that psalm was handed to God on purpose. Psalm 139:23 is where the word puts it, and it is His Spirit who lets a man stop interrogating himself at three in the morning.

You are held right now, at this table, with no name for it and eighteen months behind you. It is written that the psalmist asked his own soul why and then told it where to hope, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a man whose life is entirely in order.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and go to a doctor about the waking itself, plainly, without needing a reason to bring. Eighteen months of waking at three has physical causes worth ruling out and a doctor does not require you to have diagnosed yourself first, and being held by God has never been a reason to go without one.