The Night He Could Not Say a Word

Ilan has started doing the dishes twice.

He washes up after supper, properly, and then at about eleven he finds something else to wipe down, and then he sorts a drawer, and then it is half past midnight and he is standing in his own kitchen with a cloth in his hand.

He is putting off going to bed. He knows he is putting off going to bed. He has known it since about March.

What happened in March is not something this article is going to describe. I want to be plain about why. I was not in that room. Nobody who writes anything on the internet was in that room, or in yours. And the surest way for a man in Ilan's position to be harmed is a stranger deciding, at a distance and with great confidence, what was in there.

So: he woke in the dark, and he could not get a word out of his mouth, and it lasted for a period of time he could not tell you accurately, and it has not happened again since.

Once. It has happened exactly once, five months ago, and it has changed every single evening since.

He is forty-one. He teaches at a school. He is the calmest person at every table he sits at and everyone who knows him would tell you so.

Here is the week it caught.

His wife, who has said nothing for five months, said on a Tuesday, "Come to bed."

And he said, "In a minute."

And she said, "You have said in a minute every night since March."

And he stood there with a cloth in his hand and had no idea what to say to a woman who had been counting since March and had never mentioned it.

You know this. Something happened once, and it has not happened again, and it has reorganized everything, and the reorganizing is now larger than the thing.

Three verbs and one reason

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

I am not going to tell you what happened in March. I am not going to name anything and I am not going to describe anything. I am not going to teach you a technique, a prayer to say before bed, a thing to do with a doorway or a pillow, or any procedure at all. 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 method 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 warier of going to sleep, I have failed at the one thing this article exists to do.

What I am going to do is read you one sentence a man wrote about an ordinary night in the middle of the worst week of his life.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Three verbs about a night. Lay down. Slept. Woke.

David wrote that psalm while running from his own son, with an army behind him and a country turned against him, and in the middle of it he stops and reports that he went to bed and went to sleep and woke up again.

That is the whole of the verse. It is not dramatic. It is a man noticing that the most ordinary sequence in human life happened to him, and then giving the credit for it somewhere other than to himself.

For the LORD sustained me. That last clause is doing all the work. He does not say he slept because he was calm, or because the situation had improved, or because he had managed his mind well. He says the sleeping happened because he was held.

You have been sustained through every night since March, and the sustaining was never something you were producing. Psalm 3:5 assigns the sleeping and the waking to the Lord rather than to the man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen at half past midnight.

And notice the third verb, because it is the one nobody stops on. I awaked. He counts waking up as part of what God did. Not just the sleeping. The waking.

You were woken every morning by the same One who held you all night, and the psalm counts that as an item worth reporting. It is written that he lay down and slept and awoke because the Lord sustained him, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ordinary morning something a person can receive rather than merely survive.

Once is not a forecast

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

It happened once. In March. It has not happened since.

And the evenings have been reorganized around a single event that has not repeated in five months, and I want to name that plainly, not as a criticism, but because a man standing in a kitchen at midnight with a cloth has usually stopped being able to see the arithmetic.

You are not being measured by how your evenings have gone since March, and no verse anywhere makes a person's nerve the test of anything. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an ordinary caution from being weighed as unbelief.

But here is what has cost the most, and it is not the dishes.

It is that your wife has been counting since March and never said a word, and the two of you standing in the same kitchen at midnight for five months in complete silence about it.

That is a heavier thing than one night in March, and it is the one that has a remedy available tonight.

You are permitted to say the true sentence to the person you live with, and Scripture treats that as ordinary rather than as a failure. 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 in the dark unable to move or speak is describing something with ordinary medical explanations that are common, well understood, and treatable, and five months of a delayed bedtime is a sleep matter in its own right. Say it plainly to a doctor this month. That is not instead of God and it is not a lesser answer. And if the months have gone somewhere darker than uneasy, tell somebody this week: your wife, 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 kitchen on your own.