The Nine Hundredth Midnight

Seven compartments, four rows. Twenty eight doors, each one about the size of a thumbnail, each one with a lid that goes down with a click if you do it right and does not if you do not, which matters at one in the morning when everybody is asleep.

She does it at midnight on Sunday because Sunday midnight is the only reliably quiet hour in the week.

Eleven items. Two of them look almost identical and are not, and there was a night in the first year when she got them the wrong way round and caught it and did not sleep, and since then she does that pair first, alone, before anything else is on the table.

Her father is upstairs. He can manage a lot of things and he cannot manage this one, and the fact that he cannot manage it is one of the things he is quietest about, so it happens after he has gone up, which is her decision and which she has never explained to him.

Nine hundred times, near enough. She worked it out once and wishes she had not.

There is a specific quality to a task like this that people who have not done it do not have a word for. It is not hard. Any competent adult could do it. It takes eighteen minutes. The difficulty is entirely in the fact that it is the nine hundredth one, and that there will be a nine hundred and first, and that the nine hundredth is in no way distinguishable from any of the others, so there is no sense of progress available anywhere in it.

Progress is the thing that is missing. Not gratitude, which she has, and not meaning, which she could give you an argument for. Progress. Something that moves.

And what arrives at about twenty past midnight, with four rows done and three to go, is not despair. It is flatter and it is stranger. It goes: nobody has ever seen me do this. Not once. Not one person in nine hundred Sundays has been in the room. And the thought after it is worse, and it is: nobody ever will, and the last one will be exactly like the first one, and then it will simply stop.

You will have your own twenty past midnight. The task that repeats and does not accumulate.

The most absurd thing Jesus ever counted

There is a sentence of Jesus that I think is deliberately close to comic, and I mean that with reverence. He is trying to say something about the scale of God's attention and He picks an example so extreme that it cannot be argued with.

Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.Luke 12:7

Numbered. Not known about in general. Not roughly estimated. Numbered, which is a word about an operation somebody performed, item by item, and the items are hairs.

Consider what that image is designed to do. Hairs are the least significant thing about a person. They fall out. They are replaced. They are so unimportant that we sweep them off the floor without a thought. And they change daily, which means the number is not a fact that was established once. It is a running count.

That is what He chose. Not your deeds, not your prayers, not the important things. The trivial, repetitive, constantly changing, entirely pointless-seeming detail. And He says it is counted.

So take it plainly: you are being counted at a level far below the level anybody would bother with, and that is what Luke 12 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about sparrows and lays it on a kitchen table with twenty eight small doors open on it.

Which answers the twenty past midnight directly. Her problem was that the nine hundredth is indistinguishable from the others and therefore does not register anywhere. But a God who runs a count on hairs is a God for whom identical repeated items are not a problem. That is precisely the kind of thing being counted. The nine hundredth midnight is not lost in the pile. It has a number.

And notice what Jesus is doing with it. He is not admiring the hairs. The sentence exists to make one point about the person: fear not. The counting is offered as the reason a frightened person can stop being frightened. It is not a compliment about their significance. It is a description of how close the attention is.

You have been attended to at the smallest possible scale, on the nights it was most identical to all the others, because the written word puts a running count on the least important thing about a body, and His Spirit is what makes that land on a woman at a table at twenty past midnight.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and be plain, because this site will not praise anybody for carrying alone what should not be carried alone.

Nine hundred weeks of sole responsibility for another person's medication is a real weight, and the near miss in the first year is a normal consequence of that weight rather than a failure of care. Ask the pharmacist about a blister pack made up by the pharmacy, which exists and which many people never think to ask for. Ask the doctor for a review of whether eleven items are all still necessary, in those words. Ask about a social worker, who can see options a family cannot see from the inside.

And if the midnights have started to go somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has begun to feel like rest, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Handing part of it over is not a reduction in love. You are held exactly as much on the week the pharmacy does it as on the nine hundred weeks you did, because Scripture never measures our standing by what we shoulder, and His Spirit is what makes that true in the body rather than only on paper.

Nine hundred are not a total

And the guardrail. The nine hundred Sundays are not accruing anywhere as credit, and there is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, every single time, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

Nobody is ranked. She is not further along than her brother who does the mornings. That measurement is not in this book, and a hidden hour that starts scoring itself against a visible one has traded something true for something exhausting. You have nothing to win at that table and nothing to prove upstairs, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.