The Man They Call At Two In The Morning

Two seventeen, and it is a name he expected.

He does not mind. That is the honest starting point and it matters. He has never once resented a two in the morning call, and he would rather be the man who gets them than the man who does not.

But he is sitting on the edge of the bath now, at ten to four, having said the right things for an hour and a quarter, and he has run out of something and he does not have a word for what it is.

There are six or seven of them who have his number for this. He is glad about that too. He is the one you call, and it did not happen by accident; he has spent fifteen years being reliably awake and reliably kind, and the reputation is deserved.

What nobody knows, including his wife, is that he has been running on empty since about February and he has told nobody, because the only people who would understand are the people who call him, and a man cannot ring the person who rings him.

You know that edge of the bath. Yours might be a different room. But somewhere you are the one who picks up, and there is nobody above you in the chain.

Say what fifteen years has cost

Nobody in that chain has counted it, so let us.

It has cost him sleep in a way that has become structural rather than occasional, so that he is now tired in a way a weekend does not touch.

It cost him his own hard year. In the spring his father went into a home and he did not tell one of those six people, because telling any of them would have felt like withdrawing a service.

And it has cost him the top of the chain. That is the real thing and nobody talks about it. Everybody knows to ring him. There is not one person in his life whose name he would ring at two seventeen, and he has known that for about three years without ever saying it out loud.

You have been at the top of a chain with nobody above you, and God has never once required you to be that for anybody. Psalm 145:14 says the Lord upholds all that fall and raises up all those that are bowed down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it on a man sitting on the edge of a bath at ten to four. There is somebody above him and there always has been.

Arise and eat, and notice what comes before the word

There is one line built for a man with nothing left who is still standing up.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.1 Kings 19:5

Look at what happens and what does not happen. A prophet who has just done something enormous is under a tree asking to die, which is about as empty as a man gets, and heaven's first move is not a rebuke, not a reminder of the victory two days earlier, and not a word about his calling.

It is food, and then more sleep, and then more food. Twice, in fact, before anything is said to him at all. And when the word finally comes it is quiet and it comes days later on a mountain.

The order is the whole point, and His Spirit is the one who makes that order land on a man who assumes he needs to be told something rather than fed.

You are being fed before you are being told anything, and the feeding is not a lesser thing than the word. That is not a soft reading of a famous chapter. The written word puts bread twice before speech, and the Spirit is the one who does the touching while a man is asleep and not doing anything at all.

And let me be plain, because otherwise this becomes another duty. Rest here is not a discipline you are behind on. I am not telling you to stop answering, I am not asking you to give anybody your reasons, and none of those six people has been let down by a man who is empty.

Being fed is not being taken off the list

The fear is small and specific and it is not vanity.

It is that if he says anything, the six stop calling. And the six calling is not a burden to him; it is close to the whole of his sense that his life is doing something. Take that away in the name of self care and you have not helped him, you have removed the last load bearing wall.

You are not going to lose your place by eating, and the touch on the shoulder never once came with a removal. 1 Kings 19:7 says the journey is too great for you, which is a statement about the road rather than about the man, and the same Spirit is the one who makes too great a mercy rather than an assessment.

One plain sentence before we go on. If empty since February has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you answer anybody else's call. That is not a failure at the top of a chain. That is the shepherding, arriving through people with hands and telephone numbers, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.