You Do Not Have To Name It Yet

The heat lamp over the second pen has a moth in it that has been going round the same circuit for an hour, and everybody has noticed and nobody has done anything about it, because there are four of you in the shed and every one of you has both hands full.

Lambing. Third week. The radio is on low because somebody put it on at the start of the season and turning it off now would feel like tempting something. There is a flask on the straw bale with the cup screwed on wrong. Alan is on his knees in the far pen talking to a ewe in the voice men keep for animals and small children. Somebody's daughter, home from college and useless in the best possible way, is holding a lamb against her chest with her chin on top of its head. It is warm and it smells of iodine and lanolin and it is, in its own filthy way, one of the good places to be at four in the morning.

You are awake because it is lambing. Nobody needs an explanation for that.

What nobody knows, including you, is that you were awake at four in the morning in the fourth week of January too, when there was nothing whatever to be up for. And in the second week of February. And you have stopped counting because counting it made it into a thing, and you did not want it to be a thing.

Something is turning over in you. It has been turning over for about a month. It is not dread and it is not excitement and it is not an idea, and every time you have gone looking for the word for it you have come back with the wrong one. You tried calling it restlessness. That was not it. You tried calling it guilt, because that is the reflex, and it was not that either. So you have been carrying an unlabelled thing about in your chest for four weeks, doing the lambing, saying nothing to anybody, because the very first question anybody would ask is what do you think it is, and you have no answer, and you have started to feel foolish for having a question at all.

Read what the text says happened, and not the version everyone remembers

There is a night in Scripture that people summarize badly, and the summary is what makes readers like you feel stupid.

A boy is lying down in the house of the Lord. The lamp of God has not yet gone out, so it is late but not yet morning. And he hears his name. Just his name.

He does the obvious thing. He runs to the old priest and says, here I am, you called me. And Eli says: I did not call you. Go back and lie down.

It happens again. Same name, same running, same answer. Go back, my son, lie down.

Then the text stops the narrative and tells you something flatly, in its own voice, so that nobody reading it can turn the boy's confusion into a failing.

Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.1 Samuel 3:7

That is the narrator, not a critic. The not knowing is reported as a plain condition, the way you would report the weather, and there is no reproach anywhere in the sentence. You are not behind for being unable to name what is moving in you, and Scripture puts your exact condition on the page without one word of blame attached to it. That is His word doing it and not my kindness, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies an ancient sentence to a person standing in a shed in the fourth week of a lambing season.

Now the part that should genuinely take weight off you. Eli was wrong twice. The most experienced man in the building, the priest, the one person in the story whose entire job was to know what God sounds like, sent the boy back to bed twice with the wrong answer. He was not being careless. He simply did not know yet.

Nobody named it the first two times, and nothing was lost

Sit with that for a moment, because it dismantles the thing that has been making you feel foolish.

If Eli could not identify it immediately, you being unable to identify yours in four weeks is not a spiritual deficiency. It is the ordinary shape of this. The Lord called a third time. He was not offended by the two wrong answers and He did not withdraw, and there is no hint anywhere that the delay cost anybody anything at all.

You have not missed your moment, and the God who called the same boy three times is not a voice that gives up on the second attempt. The written word simply has Him calling again, and His Spirit is still doing that work now, patiently, in people who have no vocabulary for what is happening to them.

And look at what Eli finally hands the boy, because it is not what you would expect a wise man to hand a confused one. He does not offer an interpretation. He does not say, this will be about your future, or, God is preparing you for something. He gives him one short sentence to say if it happens again: Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.

That is all. A posture, not a meaning. The boy is not asked to understand a single thing before he answers.

There is one more detail, and it is small enough that most people read straight past it. When the Lord came and called again, Samuel did not manage the full sentence Eli gave him. He left a word out. He simply said, speak, for Your servant hears. He was short of the script and God spoke to him anyway.

You have been given the same ground he stood on, and the accuracy of your wording was never the qualification. That is written into the account itself, and it is His Spirit at work in a person to will and to work for His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), which means the movement in you did not originate with you and does not depend on you decoding it.

The ordinary causes are not ruled out here

I want to be honest with you about something the summaries also skip.

Nothing in this article says your four o'clock waking is a sign. People wake at four because of lambing, and shift patterns, and a hot room, and a body that is doing what bodies do, and a worry that has not been put down, and a hundred ordinary things that have nothing mystical about them whatsoever. Anyone who tells you that broken sleep is by itself a message from God is selling you a certainty that Scripture does not offer. If the waking itself is wearing you down, that is worth taking to someone who can actually help with sleep, and doing so is not unbelief.

What is being said here is narrower and better than that. You are inside His hands whether this is named or unnamed, and you do not have to work out which part is the season and which part is Him. Psalm 31:15 says my times are in Thy hand, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the sorting a person cannot do for themselves. That sorting is not your job and you would not be good at it, and neither would I.