Sunday Night And Monday Already Started

It is ten past one and Monday has already begun in her head.

She is not asleep and she has stopped pretending to be. She is running the seating plan again. She is running the moment by the window where it always goes wrong. She has a whole conversation with a fourteen year old boy who is currently asleep four streets away and knows nothing about any of it, and she loses the conversation, and she runs it again with better lines, and she loses it again.

At some point she gets up for a glass of water because getting up feels like doing something.

On Friday, in the staff room, somebody said it kindly. Honestly, I could not do your class. I do not know how you cope with them. Two other people agreed. Somebody said you must have the patience of a saint.

She said something light and put her mug in the sink.

I want to say the true thing quietly. Nobody in that staff room has ever been in her house at ten past one. And the coping they were admiring is not a quality she has. It is a set of hours she gets through in the dark with no company, and then she stands in front of thirty of them at nine and does it again.

You know these hours. Yours might be about a shift, or a hearing, or a phone call you have to make on Tuesday. Somewhere in your week there is a night where the next day starts early, and nobody who compliments you has ever been awake in it.

The cost, before anybody calls it patience

Let me name it, because the staff room did not.

It costs about four hours of every Sunday, and it has been taking them since September. It costs the thing that used to be Sunday: the long bath, the phone call to her sister, the bit of the evening that belonged to her. It costs the honest answer to how was your weekend. And it costs something harder to say out loud, which is that she has started to feel a kind of low shame about needing so many hours to prepare for a room she is supposedly good in.

You have been paying for those hours out of a body that never gets reimbursed, and God has not once counted the rehearsing against you. Psalm 121:3 says He who keeps you does not slumber, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a sentence about a keeper who does not sleep and lays it over a woman at ten past one instead of leaving it in a hymn. He was not waiting for morning to be interested in you.

Someone stayed awake, and it was not only you

There is one line for a person who cannot get to sleep on a Sunday.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for you, Lord, only make me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Read the two halves of it. The lying down is the easy bit. The word doing all the work is only. Only You. Not the plan. Not the seating chart. Not the better lines she keeps rehearsing. Safety comes from one direction and that direction is not the direction she has been staring in since September, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns that from a nice psalm into an actual quiet in an actual bedroom.

You are dwelling in safety right now, at ten past one, and the safety was never something your preparation produced. That is not me being soothing. The written word gives the making to Him alone and gives the person only the lying down, and the Spirit is the one holding a woman through hours she thought she was surviving on her own. The staff room admired the wrong thing. Nobody in a staff room can see a night.

And I want to say this gently and clearly, because otherwise this becomes another weight. Your hard year with that class is not a display. It was not arranged so a school could learn something from watching you cope. God did not give you that room at nine in order to make a point in a staff room. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

Two things a woman awake at one has to hear

The first is that God still keeps people. Not kept, poetically, in an older world. Keeps, present tense, tonight, in this house. If the keeper who does not sleep is only a beautiful image, then those hours really are just you, alone, and there is nowhere to put September.

The second is that the keeping is over her. Now. Not over teachers who sleep better. Not over people with easier classes.

You have a keeper who was given to you rather than earned by you, and He does not withdraw on the nights your mind will not stop. Psalm 127:2 says it is vain to rise up early and sit up late eating the bread of sorrows, because He gives sleep to His beloved, and His Spirit is the one who makes beloved a word about you rather than a word about somebody more restful.

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