Something Instructing Her in the Night Seasons

The lamp on the kitchen table is the little one with the shade that has gone slightly brown at the top from being on too long too often, and lately it has been on too long too often.

Ten past five. The window over the sink has gone from black to that pale blue that is not light yet but is not night either. Kettle on. The dog has not even got up.

Six weeks now. She wakes at about ten to five, sometimes half four, always before the alarm, always all the way awake. Not anxious. Not with a list running. Just awake, with something turning over in her that she cannot get hold of.

She has done the sensible things. She has cut out the tea after six. She has stopped looking at the phone. She has considered whether it is her age and has decided it probably is, and then found herself unsatisfied by that at half four the next morning.

And here is the bit she has told nobody. There is a part of her that wonders whether it is God. And the moment she thinks that, she is embarrassed, because people who think that about their own insomnia are the sort of people she has spent her life being gently amused by.

Sit down at the table with me, honey. There is a verse in a psalm about the night and I want you to see how carefully it is worded.

The night seasons, and what David says happens in them

Psalm 16 is a short psalm about being kept. Halfway through, this.

I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons.Psalm 16:7

Two halves, joined by also, and both matter.

The Lord, who hath given me counsel. That is God doing something.

My reins also instruct me in the night seasons. The reins are the inward parts, the deep of a person, what we would call the gut. And they instruct. In the night.

So there are two things going on in that verse at once. Something of God, and something of his own inside, and the psalmist does not tidily separate them. He puts them side by side with an also and moves on.

That is a much more honest picture than either of the ones you have been offered. You have been given a choice between it is God and it is my age, and the verse does not require you to pick.

You are in a season the psalm has a name for, and it puts God's counsel and a person's own inward parts in the same sentence without asking anybody to choose. That is not a way of dodging your question; Psalm 16:7 joins them with also and leaves them joined, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old psalm and lays it on a kitchen table at ten past five with a lamp that has gone brown at the top. You are not required to decide tonight which it is.

Now the second half, and it is about the embarrassment, because the embarrassment is doing more damage than the waking is.

You are amused at yourself for wondering. That is a defense and I understand it, but look at what it costs: it means you cannot bring the question anywhere, including to God, because you have already ruled it out as the sort of thing a sensible woman does not say.

But the book is full of God dealing with people at night. Samuel, three times, and he thought it was Eli. Jacob, all night, at a river. Solomon, asleep. Paul in the night with a vision of a man in Macedonia. It is not a fringe category. It is one of the ordinary hours in which God speaks to people in Scripture.

You are allowed to wonder out loud, and the book you believe treats the night as one of His usual hours rather than a fringe idea. Job 33:15 says in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old man's speech into permission for a woman at a table to ask a question she has been too sensible to ask.

What I will not do, and what I will

Now, I will not tell you what is happening to you, and I want to be very plain about that.

I do not know whether God is stirring you. I do not know whether it is your body doing what bodies do at certain ages and in certain seasons. Both are real, both are common, and if this goes on and it is grinding you down, please go and see a doctor about it. That is not unbelief. That is looking after the body you were given, and I would say the same to anybody.

What I will not do is treat sleeplessness as a sign. There are people who will tell you that waking at four means something specific, and they are making it up, and building a spiritual structure on a sleep pattern is how people end up exhausted and disappointed.

You are held whichever this turns out to be, and the holding does not wait for a diagnosis. Psalm 121:3 says He that keepeth thee will not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that keeping a live thing over a woman at half four in the morning whether the waking is His doing or her body's.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works at five in the morning.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the quality of your discernment about your own nights. 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.