Six Months Of Nights And I Never Shouted

Half past six in the morning, and he is doing the school bags.

He came off the floor at six. Forty minutes home. He has about ninety minutes before he can sleep, and in those ninety minutes there is the bags, the medicine, the note for the nurse, the small negotiation about the shoes, and the school drop off, and then the drive back with the radio off because he has stopped being able to hear music.

Six months of this. And the thing that he has genuinely never been able to explain, to himself or to anyone, is that in all six months he has not once raised his voice at either of his children.

Not because he is a patient man. He would tell you flatly that he is not. Ask his brother about the summer he was twenty three. There is a version of him that lives about half an inch under the surface and shouts, and he knows that man, and that man did not turn up once between January and June.

He is not proud of it. He is unsettled by it. Because a thing you cannot account for in yourself is not a comfort, it is a question, and the question is: where did that come from, and is it still there.

You have a version of this. Some capacity you found in yourself in a hard stretch that you know is not native to you, and no way to explain it, and a private worry that it might not come back.

Say the cost before anybody says patience

Nobody has priced these six months, so let us.

It cost him music. That sounds small and it is not; he used to have the radio on and now the silence is easier and he does not know when that changed. It cost him his brother's wedding. It cost him the ordinary shape of a marriage, because he and his wife have been running a relay for half a year and the handover is the whole relationship at the moment.

And it cost him about four hours of sleep a night for a hundred and eighty nights, which is a debt in the body that no amount of Saturdays repays.

You have been running on borrowed hours, and God has never once totaled up what it should have cost your temper. Isaiah 40:29 says He gives power to the faint and to those with no might He increases strength, and it is His Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it in a hallway at half past six with a school bag in one hand. The reason the shouting man did not turn up has a name.

Power to the faint, which is a specific category

There is one line built for a man who cannot explain his own patience.

He gives power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increases strength.Isaiah 40:29

Look at who is on the receiving end. Not the strong, and not the strong who have got a bit tired. The faint. Them that have no might. The verse is specific, and the specificity is the point: this is a supply that arrives at the place where a man's own supply has ended, which means the arrival is always slightly after the end of what he had, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a lived thing rather than an elegant piece of Hebrew.

You have been given power at the exact point where your own gave out, and the giving was not a reward for how you were handling it. That is not a compliment with a verse attached. The written word puts the increase where there is no might, and the Spirit is the one who kept a man's voice down in a hallway for a hundred and eighty mornings. His brother knows what he is capable of. So does he. That is why he is unsettled.

And it needs saying plainly. Your child's illness is not a display. It was not arranged so a family could learn something about fathers by watching you cope. God did not put a child in a hospital to make a point about your character. Nobody in that house is an exhibit and nobody ever was.

Two things a man with unexplained patience has to hear

The first is that God still supplies people. Not supplied, poetically, in an older world. Supplies, present tense, at half past six, in a hallway. If power to the faint is only a beautiful old line, then this was a lucky six months of self control, his brother is right about him, and the question stays open.

The second is that the supply was not conditional on his asking well. He mostly did not ask. He mostly drove.

You were carried through six months you had no reserves for, and the carrying did not depend on your noticing it. Philippians 2:13 says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes works in you into something a man can actually locate rather than a doctrine he agrees with.

One honest sentence before we go on. If the tiredness has stopped being tiredness and gone somewhere heavier, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely in question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before anybody else. That is not the supply failing. That is the supply arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.