No End Of Shift

Charmaine has not had an evening in four years where the phone being face down meant anything.

It is face down. It is always face down, out of a habit she formed to be present with her other two. But she knows exactly where it is at every moment, and there is a part of her that is checking it without her eyes going anywhere near it, and she can do this now while holding a conversation and laughing at the right places.

Her middle one is twenty. That is all I am going to say about the particulars, because they are his and not mine and not this article's.

What I am going to talk about is the four years.

She works. She cooks. She has been to two weddings and enjoyed them. She has a friend she tells almost everything to and she has not told her the worst of it, and she is not sure why, except that saying it out loud would make it a thing in the room and at the moment it is a thing in her chest and she can carry that.

And she is so tired that sleep does not touch it.

That is the part she has never been able to describe. It is not sleep debt. She has had that; she had three children. This is different. It is the tiredness of a person who has been on shift for four years without a single hour where she was properly off, because there is no version of the week where she is off, because the phone could go.

There is no Friday.

And what arrives, when it arrives, at about three, is not a question about God's plan and it is not anger. Charmaine is not angry. She has looked and it is not there.

It is: nobody asked me, and I am awake in here on my own.

You may know that kitchen and that hour.

Maybe yours is a child, or a parent, or a husband, or a sibling nobody else in the family will speak about. Maybe it has been four years, or eleven, or since you were nineteen.

Everything I am not going to say

Let me clear this kitchen. People have been in it.

I am not going to tell you God sent this to your child. I do not believe it, I will not say it, and if somebody said it to you at a church door then they were wrong and I am sorry.

I am not going to tell you there is a lesson in it. I will not ask you what you are meant to be learning from your son. That question, asked of a woman four years into this, is a small cruelty in decent clothes and you owe nobody an answer.

I am not going to tell you it will be all right. I do not know. I will not promise you an outcome for your child that I have not seen, because that is the cheapest thing a person in my position can do and you would be entitled to throw it back at me later.

And I am not going to suggest, in any form, however gently phrased, that anything about this is because you did not have enough faith or did not pray properly or missed something. That is not true, it has never been true, and I would not put it on you.

I have one thing. It is short.

Somebody is awake

There is a psalm for people traveling at night, and it has a line in it about sleep, and the line is not about you.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

He does not sleep.

Not: He will wake if you call loudly enough. Not: He checks in periodically. The psalm makes it a fixed property of who is keeping watch, and it is written for people going through country where things happened at night.

Which means that at three in the morning, in a kitchen, with a phone face down on a counter, you have not been the only one awake in that house for four years.

And you have never once been the only one awake. The written word makes the not-sleeping a property of the keeper rather than a response to the kept, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman at three in a dark kitchen.

And He is in this and He is not somebody who leaves at a shift change. The word says the LORD is thy keeper, the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a location rather than a sentiment.

What He is not asking of you

Now let me take one thing off you, because I think you have been carrying it and nobody put it there.

You have been holding your son up. Not literally, and you know you cannot, and you would say so in an interview. But at three in the morning there is a posture in you that is holding, and it has been held for four years, and the muscles are what is tired.

Nobody asked you to be the one keeping him.

He that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and that sentence is in the psalm precisely because human beings cannot do it and were never expected to.

And the keeping is not on your shoulders. The word gives the keeping to Him five times in one short psalm and never once to the traveler, and the Spirit is the one who makes a handing over real rather than a phrase somebody says.

And you are not failing at something you were assigned. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that mercy rather than a low opinion, in a woman who has not been properly off for four years.