Could You Not Watch One Hour

It was the second night and he had said he would take it so that she could sleep.

Her mother had been going for about four days by then and everybody was past the point where anybody makes good decisions. He had meant it. He had come in at eleven with a flask and a book he never opened and told her to go to the family room and lie down, and she had gone, because she trusted him.

And he fell asleep in the chair at about a quarter past two.

He does not know how long. Between forty minutes and an hour and a half, is his best estimate, and he has done that estimate about four hundred times since.

She came back in at ten to four and her mother was gone.

She did not wake him. That is the part. She stood in that room, in the dark, with her mother, and she let him sleep, and when he woke at about twenty past four she was sitting on the other side of the bed holding a hand and she looked up and said: it is all right. She went about half an hour ago.

Six years.

Nobody has ever raised it. Not her. Not her sister, who was not there and has never asked for details. Not his wife, who knows every part of it and has never once used it in an argument, which is its own kind of grace and which he notices every time they argue.

He has been to a great many bedsides since and he does not sleep at any of them. That is not discipline. That is a man with an alarm going off in his own chest at a quarter past two, every time, for six years.

The record keeps the hour they slept and the question He asked

Let me put the four hundred estimates down before anything else, because that is where the six years have actually gone.

Forty minutes or an hour and a half. You have run that calculation more times than you have run any other thought in six years, and it has never once produced a different result, because the calculation is not really about the length. It is about whether you were there for the part that mattered, and you have been trying to find an arrangement of the numbers in which you were.

There is no such arrangement, and you have known that since about the second week. Nothing written asks a man to arrange the numbers until he comes out innocent, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed the arithmetic to come out.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the record you were raised on keeps exactly this, about the three men closest to Him, on the worst night there was. That is not my kind reading of six years, it is what stands written in Mark's fourteenth chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been at every bedside with you since.

Read it, and notice that the question is left in.

Then He returned to His disciples and found them sleeping. Simon, He said to Peter, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour?Mark 14:37

Could you not keep watch for one hour.

Not written by somebody protecting a reputation. That is the founding leadership, asleep, at the one hour they were asked to be awake, and the question He asked them is recorded word for word.

And then, a few verses later, He comes back and finds them asleep again.

Now think about who read that first. Communities who looked to those men. The account does not soften it, does not explain that they were exhausted, and does not add a line about how it had been a long week, although it had been.

So this is yours right now rather than pending anybody's absolution: the account you are inside of keeps the hour that was slept through, because the written word records the question and does not spare the men it is asked of, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the sleeping version is the one we have.

And the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim. That is an argument about invention, one consideration among several, and it does not establish everything. It is not a proof and nobody should hand it to you as one.

What it does, six years on, at a quarter past two, is put a man in company he did not know he had.