I Sleep, But My Heart Is Awake

Two eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast, coffee black. He has not said the words in eleven years because he has not had to. He sits down and Carla writes nothing and hollers it back through the hatch and pours the coffee before he has his coat off the stool beside him.

Outside the window the sun is just up over the ridge and the whole lot is orange with it, his truck and the one horse trailer and a pickup that has been for sale since spring. Inside there is the smell of coffee that has been on a while and the radio doing the cattle report, and the same seven people who are always in here at this hour, and a slow tick from the fan that has needed a bearing since anyone can remember.

He eats. He reads the front page and most of the second one. He is a man in a diner and there is nothing wrong with him.

But he has been sitting on something for months now and this morning it comes all the way up. It is this. He does not think there is anything left in him that answers to God. He still says grace over these eggs. He still goes on a Sunday and he still means the words as far as he is able to mean anything. It is only that when he was younger something used to move in him and now it does not, and he has come round to thinking that what moved in him then was youth, and that it is spent, and that what is left is a decent man with good habits and nothing running underneath them.

Friend, I have driven a lot of road and I want to sit down across from you at that counter, because I think you have made a mistake about yourself and I know where the correction is written.

There is a sleeper in Scripture who says the strangest thing about herself

In the Song of Solomon, a book the old preachers read as the love of Christ for His own, there is a line spoken by somebody who has gone to sleep and knows it.

I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh.Song of Solomon 5:2

Sit with that first clause. She does not say she was asleep and then woke up. She says both things at once, in the present tense, about herself. Asleep, and something in her awake. And what the awake part is doing is hearing. It picks up a knock at a door that the rest of her is too far under to answer.

That is the correction, and it is the whole of what I came to say. What you have concluded is that the part of you that answers to God is gone. What the text describes is a part of a person that keeps listening when everything else in them has gone quiet, and it puts that in the mouth of somebody who is honestly, plainly, admittedly asleep.

You are not a man with nothing left in him, and something in you has been awake through the whole stretch you have written off. That is not a kindness I made up on the drive over; Song of Solomon 5:2 puts a waking heart inside a sleeping woman, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old line out of an old book and lays it across a man on a stool at a Formica counter. The part of you that grieves this is the part you thought was dead. Dead things do not grieve their own condition.

Now let me tell you the second thing, and it is the one that sets a man free at that counter.

You have been reading movement as the meter. When something used to rise in you, you called that God near, and when nothing rises you call that God gone, or worse, you gone. But the meter is faulty. What moved in you at twenty was partly God and partly a young man's constitution, and the two came in the same envelope so you never learned to tell them apart. Now the constitution has settled, the way it does in every man who lives long enough, and you are reading the settling as an obituary.

You have been measuring with a broken gauge, and the reading it gave you was never the truth about you. The written word says the just shall live by faith and not by what he can feel of it (Habakkuk 2:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man standing on a fact when his own weather says otherwise. Weather is real. It is just not the ground.

What the knock is, and why it is a knock and not a shout

Notice what the beloved in that verse does at a door where he already knows somebody is asleep.

He knocks. He does not break it in. He does not stand outside and list her faults through the wood. He knocks, and he speaks, and the whole business is conducted in a way that leaves her the dignity of getting up herself.

That is how heaven handles a sleeping man in nearly every account we have of it. An angel touches a prophet under a tree and says arise and eat, and there is bread already baked on the stones (1 Kings 19:5). A voice comes to a boy three times in the night and never once sounds annoyed at being missed twice. There is a pattern in it and the pattern is courtesy.

You are being knocked for and not shouted at, and the courtesy in it is His own. Revelation 3:20 says He stands at the door and knocks, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient courtesy present tense in a diner at ten past seven in the morning. Whatever you were braced for, it has not shown up, because it was never coming.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and that matters more than your weather does.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. He named the smallest seed a farmer handles. Not the size of what you feel over your eggs. Not the temperature of a man at sixty compared to a man at twenty. That a person opens his 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.