Ten Past Three

The clock face says 3:09 and Curt is already flat on his back with his eyes open.

He has not moved. That is the strange part. There is no starting up, no gasp, none of the drama a man might expect. He simply arrives, fully awake, on his back, arms at his sides, chin up, like something that has been switched on at the wall. The room is exactly as it was. The fan turns. The window is a soft gray rectangle. His wife is asleep three feet away with one arm out of the covers.

And on the nightstand, four inches from his hand, is the phone. Face up. Ringer on. Charged to ninety percent, because he plugs it in every single night of his life without thinking about it, the way other men lock a door.

Four years ago it rang at ten past three, and somebody who loved him said the sentence that cuts a life cleanly into before and after.

There is nothing left to call about now. He knows that. He could recite it to you: the man that call was about was buried a long time ago, the arrangements are all made, the house is sold, there is no living circumstance on this earth that would put that phone through his ceiling at ten past three in the morning. He knows it in daylight the way he knows his own name.

At 3:05 he starts to surface. By 3:09 he is fully awake and his whole body is a hand on a door handle. From about ten past to twenty past, he lies there in a foxhole. Everything is loud. The fan is loud. The refrigerator downstairs cycling on is loud. His own pulse is a knock at the base of his throat, and his eyes go to the phone the way a compass goes north, over and over, checking a screen that stays black.

By half past it has gone off him like a wave running back down a beach, and he is just a tired man in a dark room. Then he sleeps until six and gets up and is, by every visible measure, the steadiest man on his street. He carries other people's crises for a living. He is the one they call. He has never once let anybody see this.

And here is what has begun to eat at him, and I would rather say it than let it sit there unsaid. He has started to believe that the ten minutes is a report card. That a man who trusted God properly would not do this. That somewhere in him, under all the competence, there is a coward, and the ten minutes is the only honest thing about him and everything else is a performance.

I do not know what your hour is. It may not be three. I have not been in your house and I would not dream of telling you what put it there. But I know that particular ten minutes has a shape you would recognize anywhere, and I know what you have started to conclude about yourself in it, and I have come to sit on the end of the bed and tell you that you have concluded wrong.

Nobody is grading you at ten past three

Let me get the lie out of the room before we do anything else with it.

The lie says the flinch is the verdict. It says a body that braces is a soul that doubts, and that all the years of steadiness are a coat you put on in the morning, and at ten past three the coat comes off and there you are. It is a clean, tidy, devastating little argument, and it is not true, and I am not going to let it stand there in the dark with nobody answering it.

Nothing in His word grades a man on his nerves, and His Spirit is not sitting behind you filling in a chart. You have peace as a settled possession and not as a weather report, and it was given to you in a bedroom where the fan is loud and your pulse is knocking, exactly the same as in a bedroom where it is not.

Now look at when the next thing was written, because the timing is the whole gift.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Psalm 3 carries a heading that says David wrote it when he was running from his own son. Read that again slowly. He is out of the city. He is sleeping rough. Absalom holds Jerusalem, and there are men on the hillside within a morning's ride who would end him for the price of the news, and there is no version of that night where the danger is imaginary. This is not a man in a safe bed telling nervous people to calm down. This is a hunted man writing down what happened to him in the dark.

And what he writes down is not brave. It is three plain verbs and a reason. I lay down. I slept. I woke up. And then, because he is honest, he tells you who did it: for the LORD sustained me.

Take the sentence in the order it actually happens, because most men read it backwards. The sustaining is not something he generated by lying there believing hard. It ran all night, underneath him, while he was unconscious and contributing nothing whatsoever to his own safety, and he only found out about it when he opened his eyes. It is written in Psalm 3 in that order on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one turning an old soldier's night into your bedroom at ten past three: you were held all the way through the part you cannot remember, and the waking is not the moment you failed, it is the moment you find out.

The hour is not a room He is missing from

Here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you the waking will stop, and I am not going to hand you a method for stopping it, and I would not respect you if I did. There is not a technique in this whole message. A reflex that has been running for four years is not a character flaw with a five step solution attached, and any man who offers you one has never lain in that foxhole himself.

What I have to give you is better than the waking stopping, and I know how that sounds to a man who has not had it yet. It is this: the hour is not a room God is missing from.

Your whole trouble with ten past three is that you have quietly filed it as the one place you go alone. Every other hour of your day has company in it. That one does not. It is you, the fan, the black screen and the thing you are braced for, and it has been that way for four years, and the loneliness of it is doing more damage than the fear ever did.

This is a report and not a wish. Psalm 139 says the darkness does not hide anything from Him, that the night shines like the day to Him and the dark and the light are exactly alike, and the same Spirit who put that line down is awake in your bedroom right now: this is yours, in that ten minutes, in the dark with the fan going, and you were never once in there on your own.

And if the hour has gone somewhere heavier than dread, if it has started carrying thoughts about whether you want to be here at all, then tell one human being today, plainly and without dressing it up, and if there is any danger in it reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. A man who walks into help is not a man who has cracked. He is a free man using what freedom is for.