Nobody Is Expecting You at Four

Three forty seven, and Ray is awake.

He does not remember arriving at awake. There was no dream and no sound, no truck on the road, no dog in the yard. There is the ceiling, which he knows better than he knows the front of his own house, and the thin gray oblong of the window, and the fact that his eyes are open and his jaw is set.

For eleven years he ran the first milk route out of the co-op. Out the door at four. Boots on at ten to. The alarm was set for 3:50 and he beat it most mornings, because a man who beats his alarm never has to hear it, and hearing it meant he had already lost a minute he could not get back. Eleven winters of stepping into cold boots in the dark, of the yard light and the engine turning over and the first farm gate at twenty past. Eleven years of a body learning one thing so completely that it stopped needing to be told.

The route ended last spring. The co-op consolidated, the first run went to a bigger truck out of a bigger town, and Ray shook everybody's hand and cleaned out the cab and came home. He does not set an alarm now. There is no alarm to set. His phone lies face down on the dresser and there is nothing inside it that wants him.

And every night, somewhere between quarter to and ten to four, he comes up out of sleep like a cork out of water.

He lies there braced. That is the word for it. Not thinking, not worrying, not going over anything. Braced. Shoulders lifted off the mattress by a quarter of an inch, breath high and shallow, the whole frame of him leaning toward a bell that is not going to ring. His boots stand by the door where they have always stood. The keys hang on the hook. Outside, the yard light is on because it is always on, and it lights up an empty gravel apron where a truck used to be.

At ten past four he will let his shoulders down and think, well, that is that, and lie there until the sky goes gray. At six he will get up tired. He has been tired for a year and he cannot tell anybody why, because nothing is wrong. That is the maddening part. Nothing is wrong. The shift is over. He is not late for anything. There is not one single person on this earth who is expecting him at four in the morning.

Now. Yours may not be four. I have not been in your house and I am not going to pretend I know which hour it is or what put it there. But there is a clock on your side of this story too, and you knew it before I finished the sentence. Maybe it is a Sunday that still belongs to somebody who does not employ you now. Maybe it is a phone you check at the hour you used to be on call. Maybe it is a knot that arrives as regular as the mail. The shift ended and your body never got word, and somewhere in the last year you started to suspect that rest is a thing other men were issued and you were skipped.

So I have come and sat down on the end of the bed at ten to four, and I am here to tell you that you were not skipped.

What the alarm was really for

Let me name the weight first, because it has been carried in the dark and nobody has ever said it back to you in daylight.

The weight is not the early mornings. Early mornings were never the problem, and some of the best hours of your life happened inside them, with the world to yourself and the heater blowing and the road empty all the way to the county line. The weight is that being needed at four was proof. Somebody was counting on you, the counting had a time stamped on it, and a man who is counted on at four in the morning never has to sit down and work out whether he is worth anything, because the answer walks into the room every night at ten to and taps him on the shoulder. Then the route ends. The proof goes with it. And the waking stays, only now it has no employer, so it arrives every night looking like a debt that nobody is collecting.

I am not handing you a bright idea of my own here. Psalm 127 says He gives His beloved sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that off an old page and into a dark bedroom at ten to four: you have rest as a gift and never as a wage, and the gift was already in your name on every one of those eleven winters.

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

Read who the sleep goes to. Not the productive. Not the reliable. Not the man who beat his alarm eleven winters running. His beloved. That is the whole qualification, and it is not a qualification a man can lose by being unemployed at four in the morning. Solomon opens the psalm by saying that unless the Lord builds the house the builders labor for nothing, and unless the Lord watches over the city the watchman is awake for nothing. He is not mocking work. He is telling a room full of hard workers where the outcome actually rests, and it does not rest on their eyelids.

Hear where the next one comes from before you hear the line itself. It is written in Matthew 11:28 that Jesus called out to everyone worn down and carrying too much and told them the rest was His to give and that He was giving it, and His Spirit is the one who turns a written sentence into a floor a tired man can lie down on. You were released from that shift on the day it ended, and you were released from the accounting that came with it, and the release did not sit and wait for your body to agree.

Somebody is awake at four. It is not you.

Here is the thing that undoes a man who has kept a watch, so take it slowly.

You did not stay awake all those years because you loved being awake. You stayed awake because something depended on it. The milk had to move. The furnace had to be banked. The store had to open. The baby had to be turned. And somewhere underneath the eleven winters, a quiet arithmetic set itself up in you that said: if I am not up, it does not happen. That arithmetic was true about the milk. It was never true about the world, and it was never true about your house.

His word does not keep a separate ledger for men who made themselves useful early, and His Spirit is not running a quieter policy behind it. It is already settled: the watch over your house is covered by One who does not sleep, and Psalm 121 says the One who keeps you neither slumbers nor dozes off, which means He was covering it on every one of those eleven winters too, while you thought the whole thing was riding on your boots.

That is not my verdict on your nights, and I would not dare to hand you one. It is God's, recorded in Psalm 4:8, where a man lies down in peace and sleeps because the Lord alone is the one making him dwell in safety, and the same Spirit who put those words into a song is standing in your room at ten to four. This is yours, in that bed, in that hour: the safety was never a thing you kept by being awake inside it.

And if the waking has gone somewhere darker than tiredness, if the hour has stopped being empty and started being heavy, then tell one human being today, plainly, and if there is any danger in it at all reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you a while. Walking into help is one of the ordinary things a free man does.