Up Early and Late to Bed

She is awake nine minutes before the clock goes off, the way she has been for about thirty years, and she lies there in the gray light and does the arithmetic.

It is not worry exactly. It is more like a route she drives. Out the door by twenty past. Stop for gas. The two hours that are always the same two hours. Come home, put the wash through, get supper on, take the plate down the hall, sit up in the front room until whatever hour it turns out to be tonight, then lights off, then this again.

The curtain moves. There is a wind up clock on the nightstand that she keeps because it does not need a battery, and a glass of water she did not drink, and out in the hallway somebody has already got the coffee going, which means the day has started without her permission again.

And here is the sentence that arrives with the light, and it is not a dramatic sentence, it is just the truth she lives inside: this is not going to get any bigger.

She is fifty-four. The road she lives on has four houses on it. She has worked hard every day of her adult life and she is not lazy and she is not complaining, and there is simply no version of the next ten years in which the shape of this changes very much. She used to think the early rising was building something. That the hours were stacking up somewhere out of sight, and that eventually there would be a house standing where all that stacking had gone. She does not think that anymore. She still gets up at ten to five. She just no longer thinks it is building anything.

What she has instead is a low ache she does not have a name for, and it shows up in this exact ten minutes, every morning, in the gray, before her feet are on the floor. It is not that she wants somebody else's life. She has checked. She does not want the cousin's house, she does not want to move to town. It is smaller and stranger than that. It is: is this all it ever gets to be, and did anybody notice how hard I have been going at it.

And then the clock goes off and she shuts it off before the second ring, because there are other people asleep in this house, and she puts her feet on the cold floor, and the ten minutes is over for another day.

Maybe you know that ten minutes. Maybe yours is at the other end, at midnight, in a chair, with the house finally quiet and tomorrow already leaning on the door. You have been up early and to bed late for years, and you are not asking anybody to be impressed. You would just like to know what it was all going into.

Vain does not mean wrong

There is a psalm about your ten minutes, and I want to read it to you carefully, because it is one of the most misused sentences in the whole book.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Now. Nearly everyone who quotes that at a tired person is using it as a scolding. Slow down. You are trying too hard. That is not what the word is doing there.

Vain does not mean wrong and it does not mean forbidden. It means empty of the particular result you were hoping for. The psalm is not telling her to stop getting up at ten to five. Somebody has to get up at ten to five; there is a shift and there is a plate to take down the hall and the psalm is not naive about any of it. What the psalm is saying is far kinder and far more useful: the hours were never the thing your life is made out of. You have been trying to make something with them that they do not make, and that is why the stack never seemed to turn into a house.

You are not being scolded for the hours you keep, and you never were. I am not softening the psalm to make you feel better about your alarm clock. Psalm 127:2 names what the rising early cannot produce and then, in the same breath, names what God hands out instead, and the Holy Spirit is the One who reads that to a woman lying in the gray nine minutes before the clock goes off.

And look where the psalm puts the weight. Two lines earlier it says that unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Same word. The point is not that building is bad. The point is who the house is actually being built by. She has been carrying a house on her back for thirty years that she was never the one holding up.

You have been carrying a weight that was never assigned to you, and it is not yours to hold up tonight. The written word says the builders labor in vain unless the Lord builds it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a house and lifts an actual weight off an actual back at an actual hour of the morning.

He gives it sleeping

Now the second half of the verse, which is the half nobody reads out loud.

So he giveth his beloved sleep.

Two things in there and both of them matter. Start with the verb. He gives. Not He rewards, not He awards, not He releases upon completion. Gives. It is handed over, and it is handed over at the one point in the day when a person is doing nothing at all and could not possibly be earning it. That is not an accident of the phrasing. God chose the hour when your hands are open because they are asleep.

Whatever is actually going into your life is arriving in the hours you are not working. Read that again in the gray light. The thing you have been trying to produce with the early rising is being handed to you at midnight, quietly, while you are unconscious and entirely useless and completely His.

You are given to while you sleep, and the giving has never once depended on how the day went. Psalm 127:2 says He gives to His beloved in sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that an actual delivery into an actual house on a road with four houses on it.

Now the other word. Beloved. That is what the psalm calls the person in the bed. Not the productive one. Not the one who kept up. The beloved. That is the name she is under while she is asleep and not doing anything for anybody, which means it is not a name she has been earning with the hours either.

And I want to say one thing plainly here, because some of you are in a life that is small by force and not by any choice you made. Illness came, or somebody needed you and you stayed, or a door shut that you did not shut. I am not going to hand you a lecture about being at peace with the size of it, and I am not going to suggest you step back from anybody who needs you. I only want you to have this: God is not grading the size. The name over the bed is the same name.

You are His beloved in a house that is not going to get any bigger, and the name does not scale with the square footage. Psalm 127 gives that name to the one who is asleep and producing nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who says it over a person who has spent thirty years wondering whether anybody noticed.