It Only Exists At Night

Marco finishes at four. Sometimes five, if the truck runs late.

He comes out into a parking lot with maybe six cars left in it and that particular quality of dark that only exists in the hour before anything starts. He gets in. He turns the key. And there, on a dashboard that is the brightest thing for two hundred yards, is a small lit shape that has been there since June.

At four in the morning it is enormous. It is the only thing in the world with a color.

He drives home. Twenty two minutes. And somewhere on that road, usually around the second set of lights, he says to himself with real conviction: I am going to deal with that this week.

Then he goes in, and eats something standing at the counter, and sleeps until half past one in the afternoon.

And when he wakes up, the whole thing is gone. Not forgotten exactly. It has just stopped being real. It sits in the same box as the things a person half remembers from a dream, and by three in the afternoon, with the sun going through the blinds and his daughter home and the day genuinely started, there is no light. There is a car in the driveway that works.

This has been happening since June. Which means Marco has resolved to deal with it something like eighty times, and has been serious every single time, and has never once thought about it during business hours.

That is the whole mechanism. It is not avoidance. He has never made a decision to leave it. Nothing in him has ever said no.

The light lives at four in the morning. The shops live at ten. The two of them have simply never been introduced.

His wife asked him about it in August. She had ridden with him somewhere in the evening and seen it.

And he said, honestly, "You know, I only ever think about that at night."

And she said, "So think about it now."

And he laughed, and said he would, and then his son came in with something about a bicycle, and that was that.

The hour a thing is real in

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nobody has to brace.

I am not going to guess what that light is. I have not seen the car and I would not know, and a man writing at a distance guessing at somebody's engine is no use to anyone. If the car does anything that worries you on that road at four in the morning, that stops being a scheduling question and goes to somebody qualified right away.

What I want to talk about is the two clocks.

Because there are two versions of your life running, and they do not overlap. There is the four in the morning version, where the light is the brightest object in the world and the resolve is completely sincere. And there is the two in the afternoon version, where the resolve was never made, because the man who made it was somebody else, twelve hours ago, in the dark.

Nothing in that is a character fault. That is what shift work does to a week. Anybody who has worked nights knows that the day gets cut in two and the halves do not talk.

You are not unreliable, and eighty resolutions made at four in the morning were every one of them real when they were made. It is written that the darkness and the light are both alike to God, which is Psalm 139 saying that He does not have a night version and a day version of anybody, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a man's schedule and not a line of poetry.

Look at what David actually says:

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:12

Notice what that verse is not doing. It is not saying that God can manage in the dark, the way a person manages with a flashlight. It says the night shines as the day. For Him, there is no difference in kind between the hour Marco is driving home and the hour the shops are open.

Which means there has never been a moment of that man's week that God was not fully awake inside.

You have been accompanied at four in the morning in exactly the same way as at two in the afternoon, and Scripture puts the two hours on the same footing on purpose. Psalm 139 makes the night shine as the day rather than merely tolerable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page into a parking lot with six cars in it.

Build a bridge between the two halves

So the practical part, and it is small.

The problem here is not willpower. Adding more resolve at four in the morning does nothing, because the resolve is not the weak link. The resolve is fine. It is the handover that is missing.

What is needed is one object that survives the sleep.

An alarm does that. A note on the door does that. A photograph does that. Anything that exists in both halves of the day and does not depend on a man remembering something he only ever knows in the dark.

That is the whole intervention. Not more discipline. A bridge.

You have not been failing at this, and there is nothing in the written word that grades a person on what they can carry across a sleep. The passage says He knows our downsitting and our uprising and understands our thought afar off, which is Psalm 139 describing a God who tracks a man across the whole day including the part he cannot, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a comfort rather than a surveillance.

And I want to say something about August, and the laugh, and the bicycle.

There was nothing wrong with any of that. A man is allowed to be interrupted by his own son. But the moment your wife said so think about it now was the two halves being introduced for the first time in three months, and it lasted about eleven seconds.

You were being handed a bridge in your own kitchen in August, and the word never once requires a person to build one alone. Ecclesiastes says two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor, which puts a second person in the design rather than in the margins, and His Spirit is what makes accepting that ordinary instead of humbling.