He Gives His Beloved Sleep and Then the Morning

Ten to five and the last of the light is coming in low through the tall window at the end of the room, the way it does in November, straight down the aisle between large print and local history.

She lifts the chairs onto the tables. Six of them, one at a time, the way she has done it since before the refurbishment. The returns cart has four books on it and she will do those in the morning. The radiator by the door makes the noise it makes.

There is a boy who comes on Thursdays and reads about volcanoes and never takes anything home, and he went at half four. There is a woman who comes for the warmth and they both know it and neither has ever said so. It is a good place. She has looked after it for a long time.

And walking back down the aisle with the light in her eyes she thinks a thought she has thought before and has never quite finished. It is this: He is with the ones who are awake. And I used to be one of those.

She is not angry about it. That is what makes it hard to bring anywhere. There is no bitterness in her at all, just a quiet, settled arithmetic she has done somewhere along the way, which is that God, quite reasonably, has moved on to people who are actually available to Him. She still prays. She prays the way you write to somebody who has a great many other correspondents.

If that arithmetic is yours, come and sit at one of these tables for a minute. There is a psalm with one word in it that undoes the whole sum.

The strangest gift in the psalms

Psalm 127 is a short psalm about work. Building, watching, rising early, sitting up late, eating the bread of sorrows. It is a psalm about people who are trying very hard.

And then it says this.

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

Sleep is the gift. Not strength for more building. Not a longer day. In the middle of a psalm about striving, God's answer to the striver is unconsciousness, handed over as a present.

Now hold that beside the arithmetic you have been doing. You have decided that God attends to the awake and has quietly reassigned you. But here is a verse in which the sleeper is the one being given something, and the giving is affectionate, and the word attached to the sleeper is not the negligent or the lapsed.

The word is beloved.

You are the beloved in that sentence, and the sleep in it was given rather than caught. That is not a warm reading I have poured over a hard November; Psalm 127:2 puts the word beloved directly beside the word sleep, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old builder's psalm and carries it into a library at ten to five with the chairs going up. Your name in that verse is not what you have been calling yourself.

And notice something else, quietly, because it matters.

The psalm does not say He gives sleep to the beloved so that they will wake up more productive. There is no clause. The gift is not an investment. He is not managing you toward a better output. That is how the striver reads every kindness, and it is how you have been reading yours, which is why nothing has been able to land.

You have been receiving affection and filing it as instruction, and that is why none of it has reached you. The written word says that as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him (Psalm 103:13), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a line like that arrive as tenderness rather than as another item to action. Pity there does not mean condescension. It means a father's whole heart going out to somebody he made.

What He does with the ones who are not available

Let me take the arithmetic apart properly, because it deserves an answer and not just a nicer feeling.

Your sum assumes God allocates Himself by availability, the way a person allocates an afternoon. It is a reasonable model. It is also exactly upside down from what the book shows, over and over. He goes to the one out of a hundred that is not with the flock. He is found of them that sought Him not (Isaiah 65:1). He arrives, in the record, at the least available hour, to the least available person, without notice.

And He wakes people in their sleep, all through Scripture, because that is the hour a person is at their least useful and their most reachable. Samuel was asleep. Jacob was asleep with a stone under his head. Joseph was asleep. Peter was asleep in a cell the night before his execution. If God only visited the available, half the book would be missing.

You have never once been reassigned, and He has a long documented habit of arriving at people who were not expecting Him. Isaiah 65:1 says He was found of them that sought Him not, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence that startling and makes it a fact about a woman putting chairs on tables. You did not fall off a list. There was no list.

And there is the last piece, because you have a mouth and that turns out to be more important than your availability.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. He chose the smallest thing on a farm. Not the quality of your attention this year. Not how much of you is currently present. Just that a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.