An Answer For Everybody But Me

He is the one people ask, and his answers are good, and they work.

Not slick. He is not a slick man. What he does is take somebody's question seriously, and hold it for a second, and then say something that is genuinely useful, and he has been doing it for about fifteen years and there are people whose lives are visibly different because of it.

He is not performing. He believes all of it.

And at three in the morning none of it works on him.

That is the exact hour. It is almost always between about ten past three and four, and it is not every night, and it comes maybe twice a fortnight and has done for years.

He wakes up and the thing is already going. Not a specific crisis. A kind of open cold space where all the things he says in daylight are technically still true and have entirely stopped being able to hold any weight.

He lies there and runs his own material at it. He knows every argument. He has given them all, well, to people he loves.

And at three they are just sentences. He can hear them being sentences.

By about six it has gone. He gets up, he makes tea, and by eight he could answer somebody else's version of the same thing so well that they would go home helped.

He has never told anybody about the hour. Fifteen years.

Until he went somewhere

Let me say something exact about three in the morning, because you have been treating it as the hour when the truth comes out.

You have half assumed that daylight is the performance and three is the reality, and that the man lying there in the cold space is the honest one and the man at eight with the tea is a construction.

That is not information. That is a body at its lowest ebb with nothing to do.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as comfort: what fails at three is not the thing itself but your ability to reason your own way through it alone, and there is a psalm where a man says that plainly and then names the thing that changed it. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written in the seventy-third psalm, and the same Holy Spirit who has been in that room at ten past three for fifteen years is in the courtyard with you at eight.

Read both halves, because the hinge is between them.

When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.Psalm 73:16-17

When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me.

That is the whole first half of your night, written three thousand years ago by somebody who was clearly good at thinking. The trying is named as the oppressive part.

Till I entered the sanctuary of God.

Not until he thought harder. Not until he found the missing argument. He went somewhere. He changed his location, and put himself where God is met rather than where God is worked out, and the understanding came in that room and not in his own head.

So take this now rather than after the nights stop: what breaks at three is a method and not your faith, because the written word names the trying to understand as the oppressive part and puts the turn at a change of place, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept you making tea at six and answering well at eight for fifteen years.

And the guard, because there is a version of this that would insult a thinking man.

Nothing here says stop reasoning. Your reasoning is a gift, it has helped a great many people and it is not a lower form of anything, and this psalm was written by somebody doing extremely careful thinking about a real problem.

What is written simply refuses to make the private argument the place where it gets settled, and the Holy Spirit meets people in rooms rather than in conclusions.