I Lie Awake Listening To The House

There is one in the hallway that goes about twenty minutes after the heating comes on, and there is one in the roof space that you have decided is a bird.

The one you cannot place is the one over the kitchen, and it happens perhaps twice a week, and there is no pattern to it that you have been able to find, and you have looked.

That is what you do now between about half past one and three.

Not every night. Three or four a week. You lie there and the house does a thing and your eyes open and your whole body goes very slightly rigid while you work out whether it is one of the known ones, and if it is a known one you relax by about a third and lie there waiting to see whether it repeats.

Your wife sleeps through all of it. You have not told her about the one over the kitchen.

And the strangest part is that you are not really afraid. Nobody is breaking in. You are not lying there thinking about intruders. What you are doing has the texture of work, and the work is: making sure you hear it early enough.

Early enough for what, you have never actually asked yourself.

Nobody assigned you this

Let me say the thing that took me a while to see about men who do this, because it is not anxiety exactly and calling it anxiety misses it.

It is duty.

Somewhere in the first months of owning, a job description got written in you that nobody handed you and nobody would have agreed to. It says that the house is now your responsibility in a way nothing has ever been before, and that catching a problem early is part of the job, and that a man asleep is a man not doing it.

So a post got created. And you have been standing on it for months.

You have been standing a watch that nobody assigned, and lying awake has never once been one of the duties of owning a house. It is written in Psalm 121 that he that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been awake in that hallway for every one of those nights.

And I want to point at the arithmetic of the post, because that is where it falls apart.

Hearing a noise at two in the morning changes nothing about that noise. There is no action available at two. You cannot call anybody, you cannot look at anything properly, you cannot fix a thing in the dark, and by morning the noise will either have repeated or it will not have.

The watch produces no output. It is a job with no work in it, performed nightly, by a tired man.

You have been working a post with nothing to do on it, and three broken nights a week has never once made a house safer. Psalm 121 says he will not suffer thy foot to be moved and that thy keeper does not slumber, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the not slumbering on His own side of it.

He that keepeth thee

Here is the passage, and I want you to see who is on watch in it.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:3, King James Version)

He that keepeth thee will not slumber.

That is a sentence about somebody else's sleeping habits, and the whole comfort of it is in the contrast. There is one who does not sleep, and it is not you, and the reason the reader can sleep is precisely that.

The psalm is a traveling song. People sang it going up to Jerusalem, in the open, at night, in country where things happened to travelers. And what they sang was: there is a watchman, and He does not doze, and therefore I can.

You are the traveler in that psalm and not the watchman, and there has never once been a night when the keeping of your house depended on whether you were awake. The written word says he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one on that post rather than you.

And notice what the psalm does not say, because this site does not overpromise and neither does it.

It does not say nothing happens to the traveler. It does not say the road is safe or that the sun is gentle or that the journey is short. The promise is about the keeping and not about the absence of trouble.

Your kitchen may well have something in it that needs attention. The psalm is not telling you it does not. It is telling you who is awake while you are not.

You are permitted to hand the night over, and going to sleep has never once been the same as neglecting your family. Psalm 121 puts the not sleeping on God's side of the arrangement, and the Spirit of God is the one who has never once needed your help to stay awake.