Awake Before the Light

Four forty, and he is awake again, and there is no reason for it.

Nothing woke him. No noise in the street, no dream he can remember, no ache anywhere he could point at. He is simply awake, entirely awake, the way you are awake at eleven in the morning, in a dark room at four forty with two hours of night still to go, and there is that thing in his chest.

He has never had a good word for it. Thirst is the closest, and thirst is wrong, because he has tried water, standing at the jar in the dark, and the water is fine and the thing is untouched by it. Hunger is closer and also wrong. It is not in his stomach. It is somewhere behind the breastbone, and it is not painful, and that is what makes it so hard to describe: it does not hurt, it wants.

So he says restlessness, which is what everybody says, because it is the word people have. He said it once to a doctor, who was kind and asked sensible questions about caffeine and worry, and none of the answers were yes. He has tried going back to sleep and he has tried getting up and working, and the work goes well at that hour, and the thing sits behind the work watching.

This morning he does what he does perhaps twice a month. He puts on his sandals and his jacket and walks out through the quiet part of the town, past the shuttered oven, to where the last wall gives out and the ground stops being anybody's and starts being desert.

He stands there at the edge. The sand is cold. It gets cold at night and nobody expects that.

And the sky in front of him begins doing the thing it does about half an hour before the sun: not light yet, just the gray losing its grip, a thin honey line along the bottom of everything, and the shapes of the low hills coming back one by one out of the dark like they are being remembered. A dog from somewhere sits down in the cool sand a little way off and looks at the same horizon he is looking at.

He does not pray, exactly. He does not have the words for it and he is not sure this counts. He just stands at the edge of the town with his hands open at his sides, facing the light before there is any, with that thing behind his breastbone standing up in him like an animal that has heard a noise.

And after a while he goes back. And he makes tea. And the day starts and he is fine.

And tomorrow, or in nine days, or on a Tuesday for no reason, it will be four forty again, and he will be awake, and the thing will be there, and he will call it restlessness because he has no other word for it.

Maybe you know that hour. Maybe you have a version of the walk. And maybe you have quietly decided, somewhere along the way, that there is something a little wrong with you for having it.

Somebody wrote this hour down three thousand years ago

There is a psalm written by a man in a dry place, and the heading on it says the wilderness of Judah, which means he was not in a chapel, he was out where the ground stops being anybody's.

O God, you are my God; early will I seek you. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.Psalm 63:1

Look at what he does with the thing behind his breastbone. He does not ask for it to be taken away. That is the first astonishment and it should stop you for a second, because it is the opposite of what every instinct in you does at four forty. He does not say, Lord, quiet this down so I can sleep. He does not treat it as a symptom. He picks it up and points it and says: this is for You.

And he does something else that I want you to see, because it is the whole gift of this psalm. He gives the feeling its right name. My soul thirsts. Not I am restless. Not I have a temperament. Thirst, which is a word with a direction built into it: nobody is thirsty in general, thirst is always for something, and he says out loud what his is for.

You are thirsty in the psalm's sense, and the word you have been using for it has been the wrong size for years. I am not renaming your experience to make it sound holier. Psalm 63:1 has a man in a dry and weary land calling this exact hour thirst for God, and the Holy Spirit is the One who hands a person a word that fits after decades of using one that did not.

And notice where he is when he writes it. In a dry and weary land where there is no water. He is not describing the thirst as a problem the desert caused. He is saying: here I am, in the place with nothing in it, and the wanting in me is enormous, and it is aimed at You.

You have a thirst with a direction in it, and you were never a person with something faulty in his wiring. Psalm 63:1 names the early waking and the longing and puts God at the end of both of them, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a shepherd king's line out of a dry country and lays it on a man standing at the edge of a town at four forty.

This does not get cured, and that is not the bad news

Now I have to be straight with you, because a page like this one usually starts making promises here and I am not going to.

This thirst does not go away. Not tonight, not by a better morning routine, and not by getting more of God either, which is the version people expect. You can meet with Him powerfully at dawn and be awake at four forty three weeks later with the same thing standing up in your chest. That is not a failure of the meeting. That is what this particular appetite is.

The psalm knows it. Read on a few lines and the same man says his soul is satisfied as with the richest of food, and then in the same breath he says he clings, he follows hard, his soul follows hard after God. Satisfied and still following. Fed and still thirsty. Those are not in tension in the psalm and they were never meant to be.

So here is what changes tonight, and it is not the volume of the thing. What changes is where it points. It has been aimed at nothing, which is why it has felt like restlessness, because a hunger with no object is exactly what restlessness is. Aimed, it stops being a fault in you and starts being the truest thing about you.

You are being aimed rather than fixed, and the wanting in you is not going to be argued down or shamed down tonight. Psalm 63:1 keeps the thirst intact and gives it a Name to be for, and the Holy Spirit is the One who turns a wanting that has been circling with nowhere to land into a wanting that knows which way to face.

And think about what the daytime has been asked to carry all these years. Work, company, food, rest, the good ordinary furniture of a life, and every one of them has quietly been auditioning for a job none of them was built for. They failed at it because it was not their job. That is not a poor verdict on your life. It is a correct measurement of the size of the space.

You were made with a capacity nothing in the daytime has ever come close to filling, and that is a design, not a defect. It is written that the soul thirsts and the flesh longs, in a dry land, for God Himself, and His Spirit is the One who lets a person stop apologizing for the size of their own appetite.