He Sleeps With the Light On

Karim is thirty-eight years old and has slept with the hall light on since the second week of June.

What happened in June is not something this article is going to describe. I want to be plain about why. I was not in that apartment. Nobody writing anything on the internet was in that apartment. And the most common way a person in your position gets hurt is by a stranger deciding, from a distance, with great confidence, what was in the room.

So here is all of it: he woke, he was frightened in a way he has never been frightened, and he got up and put the hall light on. And he has put it on every night since.

He is a practical man. He works in logistics and he is good at it. He has a spreadsheet for his own household budget. And he cannot bring himself to turn off a light.

Here is what it has cost, and this is what I actually want to talk about.

His nephew stayed over in July and Karim spent the whole evening working out how to explain the light without explaining it. He landed on saying he leaves it on for the cat. He does not have a cat. His nephew did not notice.

His mother asked in August why he looked tired and he said work.

And there is a thing that happens at about eleven every night now, where he stands in the hall with his hand on the switch and does not turn it off, and feels ridiculous, and goes to bed feeling ridiculous, and that feeling has become a nightly appointment.

Here is the evening it caught.

His brother, staying two nights, got up for water at one in the morning and found him in the hall.

And he said, "Everything all right?"

And Karim said, "Yeah. Yeah. Just getting water."

And his brother said, "You're not holding a glass."

You know that. You have changed something about your nights, and you have a reason ready, and the reason is not the reason, and every so often somebody asks a question you have not prepared for.

Peace and safety are two different words

Let me be exact about what I am not doing here, because this is the article where being sloppy would do harm.

I am not going to tell you what happened. I am not going to name anything or describe anything. I am not going to teach you a method, a prayer for the room, a thing to do with oil or salt or a doorframe, or any technique whatsoever. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it, and I would ask you to be careful of anybody who hands you a procedure for a night they were not present at.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it more frightened of the dark than when it started, I have failed at the one thing this article exists to do.

What I am going to do is read you eight words that a man wrote about his own bed.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Two different words in there, and the order matters.

Peace is the state he lies down in. Safety is the thing God does. They are not the same word and they are not doing the same job. He does not say: I am safe, therefore I feel peaceful. He says: I will lie down in peace, because the safety is Yours to provide and not mine to produce.

The whole verse hangs on that little word only. Thou, LORD, only. Nobody else. Not the man, not the door, not the light.

You are made to dwell in safety by somebody other than yourself, and the psalm puts the word only in the sentence to shut off every other candidate. Psalm 4:8 assigns the safety to God alone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a hallway at eleven o'clock with a hand on a switch.

And read the psalm around it. David wrote that in trouble. Verse two has him talking about people who love vanity and seek after lies. This is not a poem from a man with nothing going on. It is a man in real difficulty saying, at the end of the day: and I am going to sleep, because the keeping of me is not my department.

You have never once been the department responsible for keeping yourself, and Psalm 4 was written by somebody who had every reason to think he was. It is written that the Lord only makes him dwell in safety, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient handover a present rest.

The light is not the problem

Now here is the part I most want you to have.

The light is not a spiritual failure. Let me say it in a whole sentence, because you have been feeling ridiculous about it for three months. Leaving a hall light on is not a lack of faith, it is not fear winning, and there is not one verse anywhere in the Bible about the wattage in a corridor.

You are not being assessed on whether the light is off, and Scripture never once makes a person's nerves the measure of their standing. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a body's ordinary caution from being weighed as unbelief.

What has actually been costing you is not the light. It is the cat.

It is the invented explanations. Three months of small false answers to people who love you, and the effect of those answers is that not one person in your family knows what your nights are like, and the loneliness of that is doing more than June did.

You are permitted to say the true thing to one person, and Scripture treats that as ordinary rather than as a last resort. Galatians 6:2 tells people to bear one another's burdens as normal practice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes another person knowing into an actual lightening.

And say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. A person waking suddenly, frightened, unable to move or speak, is describing something with ordinary medical explanations that are common and well understood and treatable, and three months of poor sleep is a medical matter on its own. Tell a doctor plainly, this week. That is not instead of God and it is not a lack of faith. And if the nights have gone somewhere darker than frightened, tell somebody tonight: your brother, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you standing in that hall on your own.