Three in the Morning, Jaw Already Set

He is awake before he knows he is awake, and the first thing he notices is his own teeth.

Not a dream. Nothing woke him. The house is quiet and there is nothing outside and the dog has not moved. He simply comes up out of sleep at about ten past three with his jaw set and his shoulders already somewhere near his ears, and it takes him about forty seconds to find something to be worried about.

That is the part that would tell you the most. The bracing comes first. The subject arrives afterwards, and it is a different subject most nights, and it does not much matter which one it is, because the body was already doing this before the mind offered a candidate.

By about four he has usually solved something. Not solved. Been round something eleven times, which feels like solving at that hour and looks like nothing at all at nine in the morning.

He has not told his wife. She knows he sleeps badly. She does not know about the jaw, or that he could tell you what time it is within about ten minutes without looking, or that he has started dreading half past ten at night because of what is coming.

That is you, and there was no reason tonight either.

This is not a faith problem

Let me put that down first, because it is what has been sitting on you.

If you have been anywhere near religious talk about worry, you may have collected the idea that a man with real trust would not be waking up braced, and that the jaw is therefore evidence about your standing with God. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 3:5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

It is not. A body that has learned to wake ready is doing something bodies do after a long stretch of needing to be ready, and Scripture nowhere treats it as a spiritual failing. The Bible has Elijah under a tree asking to die, David saying his bones are vexed, Jesus Himself awake and sweating in a garden while His friends slept. Not one of them is corrected for the state of their body.

You are not further from God at ten past three than you are at ten in the morning. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it attaches no requirement of composure anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that near enough to lean on in a dark room.

And if the nights have been like this for a long stretch, people work with exactly this and are good at it. Going to them is not a lesser road than prayer, and it never was.

The psalm with the numbers in it

There is a line in Psalm 3 that is worth stopping on because of the circumstances around it.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Read the heading on that psalm sometime. David is writing it while fleeing from his own son. There are people in the field who want him dead. Two verses earlier he is saying that many are they that rise up against him, and one verse before this one he is crying out loud.

That is the man who says he lay down and slept.

Not because the situation was resolved. It was not resolved; he is on a hillside. He says he slept and woke, and then he gives the reason, and the reason is not that he had worked it out or that the danger had passed. For the Lord sustained me.

The sustaining is the mechanism. Not the calm, not the arithmetic, not the going round it eleven times.

You are not required to solve the night in order to survive it. Scripture says I laid me down and slept, I awaked, for the Lord sustained me, Psalm 3:5, and the sustaining is on His side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it in a man whose jaw is already set.

The forty seconds

Here is the mechanism worth naming, because naming it will not stop it but it will stop it spreading.

Your body wakes braced. Then, because a bracing with no object is intolerable, your mind goes and finds one. And whatever it finds at ten past three gets the full weight of a body that is already at maximum, which is why an ordinary thing about work or money or somebody's health takes on a size at that hour that it will not have at nine.

That is why the subject changes and the feeling does not.

Which means the thing you have been doing every night, which is trying to settle the subject, has been aimed at the wrong target. You could resolve tonight's subject entirely and your body would find another one by Thursday.

You are not failing to think your way out of this. Scripture says take therefore no thought for the morrow, Matthew 6:34, and it is a release rather than a scolding when you read it in context, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man stop trying to litigate a night.

What to do with three o'clock

I am not going to give you a method for sleeping, and I am certainly not going to tell you to pray harder, because a man doing anything harder at ten past three is a man being asked to work in the middle of the night.

Two small things instead.

Stop treating three o'clock as a court. Whatever your mind produces at that hour is not a finding. It is not information. It is a subject handed to a body that was already braced, and no decision made at three has ever survived contact with nine in the morning.

And say one sentence out loud, in the dark, rather than going round it eleven times. Not a long prayer. Lord, I am awake again and I do not know why. That is the whole of it, and it is honest, and it is the first thing you will have said out loud in that room in months.

You are welcome in that conversation exactly as you are at that hour. Scripture says cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee, Psalm 55:22, and the sustaining is the same word as the one on the hillside, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a weight rather than requiring a man to put it down by force.