Four Nights and a Thermometer

Two forty. The third time.

The baby is nine weeks and is doing what nine week old babies do, which nobody warns you about properly because there is no way to say it that carries. The three year old has whatever the three year old has, which the office says is viral and to keep an eye on, and which means a thermometer on the arm of the couch and a number she checks and checks and checks.

She has been up at ten past eleven, at one fifteen, and now at two forty. The middle one was the toddler. The other two were the baby. Between one forty and two forty she did not sleep either, because she was lying there listening to the monitor and doing arithmetic about how much time she had left before the next one.

Downstairs the kitchen has last night's dishes in it because she chose sleep over dishes at nine and then did not get the sleep, which is the sort of joke the universe makes at three in the morning.

Here is what four nights actually produces, as a list of outputs anybody could inspect: nothing. There is no line item. Nothing is finished. Nothing is different. The house is slightly worse than it was on Sunday. The three year old is the same amount of ill. The baby is nine weeks and one day instead of nine weeks. If somebody asked her what she did this week, and she wanted to answer honestly rather than defensively, she would find that she genuinely could not construct a sentence.

Her husband is working nights this month. He is doing his part and she knows it and it does not touch the specific problem, which is that from eleven at night until six in the morning she is the only conscious adult in the building.

And around three, when the baby has gone down and she is standing at the top of the stairs deciding whether to lie down for the ninety minutes or not, the thought comes. It is not self pity. It is not even complaint. It is flatter than that and it is worse. It goes: none of this counts anywhere. It is not being written down. There is no record. It is happening and going and leaving nothing, and it will happen again tomorrow.

You will have your own three in the morning arithmetic. The hours that produce nothing anybody can point at.

What the psalm actually calls you

There is a verse people quote at exhausted parents and it is almost always quoted in a way that makes things worse, so let me handle it carefully.

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

The way this normally gets used is: God gives sleep to those He loves, therefore being awake at three means something has gone wrong at the spiritual end. That reading is cruel, it is bad translation practice, and it would put the burden on the very person the psalm is written to lift.

Look at what is actually being called vain. It is not being awake. It is the bread of anxious toil: the belief that the outcome rests on how hard you drive yourself, that the house holds together because you hold it together, that if you stop for ninety minutes it comes apart. That is what the psalm calls empty, and it does not say it to scold. The previous verse says unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. The whole psalm is removing a weight, not adding one.

And then the last clause, which is the one she needs and which is not about sleep at all.

He gives to his beloved sleep. Whatever you conclude about the sleep, look at the noun in the middle. You are called beloved in the middle of a psalm about being awake, and that is what Psalm 127 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a pilgrim song about builders and lays it down on a landing at three in the morning.

That title is not conditional on how the night went. She did not get the sleep. The psalm still calls her the beloved. Those two facts sit in the same verse without embarrassment, and a person who can hold both of them has been given something that will hold at two forty.

Now the arithmetic. Her fear was that the hours leave no record. But God is described elsewhere as the one who keeps count of tossings and puts tears in a bottle, Psalm 56:8, and if the turning over in a bed is counted then the standing at the top of a staircase is not falling through anything. You have been counted in the part of the night that produced nothing, because the written word says the counting reaches that far down, and His Spirit is the one who makes it feel less like a ledger and more like company.

Where the load is bigger than one person

Now I want to stop the article and say something plainly, because this site will not admire you for carrying something no one person can carry.

Being past the edge of what a body can do is information about the load, and it is not information about the person carrying it. It is not a spiritual condition and it is not a failure of faith.

So: tell your doctor the true sentence about how little sleep there has been this month, not the polite one. Ask about respite care, which exists, and which the people who most need it are reliably the last to ask for. If there is anybody within reach who could take the two to six, ask them badly rather than not at all. And if the nights have begun to go somewhere dark, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Naming a limit out loud is not the opposite of faithfulness. It is frequently the shape faithfulness takes in the fourth week.

And nothing in that paragraph competes with anything else in this article. You are held exactly as much on the night you called somebody as on the night you got through it alone, because Scripture never grades our standing by our endurance, and His Spirit is what makes that true in the body rather than only in the head.

What four nights are not

One more guardrail, quickly, because it matters.

The four nights are not accumulating anywhere as credit. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, every single time it appears, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

And nobody is ranked. She is not further along than her husband on his nights, and not further along than the woman down the street whose children sleep. That measurement is not in this book. You have nothing to win here and nothing to prove at two forty, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what stops that being a slogan and makes it a floor.