The Kitchen Light at Four

The light over the stove is the only one on, because turning on the overhead would be a decision and he has not made a decision in five days.

Four in the morning. He is at his own kitchen table in the chair he sits in every single day of his life, and there is a cup in front of him that he made at three-fifteen and has not drunk. Upstairs everybody is asleep. The house makes the sounds it makes.

Five days ago he found something out about his wife.

We are not going to talk about what. It does not matter for the purposes of this page and it is nobody's business, and the one thing I am not going to do on this page is take a position on your marriage, or her, or him, or what anybody should do about anything. That is not what this is for and it would be a cheap thing to attempt from a distance.

What this is for is four in the morning.

Because that is the part nobody prepares a person for. He has run the whole thing already, hundreds of times, in the way a mind does at that hour. He has been furious and then ashamed of being furious. He has been tender and then furious about being tender. He has constructed four conversations and had all of them, at high speed, alone, with a version of her that is not really her.

And underneath all of it there is one thing that will not resolve, which is this: there is nobody to call.

Not because he has no friends. He has friends. He has a brother. He has a pastor and he likes him. He cannot call any of them, because there is no version of that phone call that does not put something about his wife into somebody else's head permanently, and he is not willing to do that at four in the morning on the strength of five days.

So the one subject that has completely taken over his life is the one subject he cannot say out loud, and he is at a kitchen table in the dark with a cup he is not drinking.

And you know that table. You found out about somebody you love and the discovery came with a silence attached, and the silence is not cowardice and it is not denial, it is that saying it makes it real in the world and puts it in other people permanently.

So take this in before we go one line further, because it is four in the morning and you have five nights of this behind you. You are not the only one awake in this kitchen and you have not been once. Psalm 121:4 says He that keepeth thee will neither slumber nor sleep, and it is a statement about who is on watch rather than a promise about how you will feel, and the Holy Spirit is at this table with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Somebody has been collecting them

There is a line in the fifty-sixth psalm that is so specific and so strange that it is worth reading three times before you decide what you think about it.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Three images and all three are about record-keeping.

Tellest my wanderings means counted, numbered, kept track of. Not observed generally. Counted. Then the bottle, which is an image of collection, of somebody catching something that would otherwise fall on the ground and be gone. And then the book, which is the plainest of the three: written down, on a page, where it can be read again.

Now think about where you are. Five nights at a kitchen table. Nobody has seen any of them. Your wife is asleep upstairs. Your children have no idea. Not one human being on this earth knows that you have been at this table at four in the morning five times running, and there is no record of it anywhere, and by any ordinary accounting those five nights simply have not happened.

Somebody has been counting them.

You have been recorded, and every one of the five nights is written down somewhere. The written word uses three separate images of keeping and record, which means the private hours are not lost hours and never were; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the keeping, at a kitchen table, at four in the morning, with the light on over the stove.

And look who wrote it. The heading on that psalm puts David in the hands of enemies in a foreign city. It is not written by a man whose situation had resolved. It is written by somebody in the middle of it, which is why it is any use to you tonight.

The silence is not a character flaw

I want to be careful and exact here, because you have been judging yourself and the judgment is wrong.

You have not told anybody, and you have started to wonder whether that is cowardice. It is not. You have identified something real, which is that information about your wife, once placed in another person, cannot be retrieved. Whatever else is true, she is a person, and you are protecting her from a room full of people knowing something on the basis of five days, and that instinct is honorable.

The trouble is not the instinct. The trouble is that the instinct, left alone, produces a man at a table at four in the morning for five nights running, and a man cannot do that indefinitely, and the cost of it lands on the same household you are trying to protect.

You were not weak to stay silent, and the silence came out of care rather than out of fear. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench, which describes what He declines to do to somebody who is barely holding; His Spirit is doing that not-breaking on His own schedule, and He is not assessing how well you are coping.

And here is the way through it, and it is narrower than it looks. There is a difference between telling somebody about her and telling somebody about you. You can put a man in front of a friend and a counselor and a pastor without putting a whole marriage there. I am carrying something I cannot talk about and I have not slept in five days is an entirely true sentence that discloses nothing about anybody else, and it is enough to get a person the help they need.

You are allowed to be helped without exposing anybody, and those are two different acts. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, and it is written as a plain instruction to a community rather than as an exception granted to people with acceptable problems; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has kept you upright for five nights.

And I am not going to be gentle about this next part, because it is four in the morning. Five nights without sleep is a medical fact as well as a spiritual one, and a man in that state should not be trusted to assess his own condition. Talk to somebody this week: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor, a friend who can hold a confidence. If the nights are going somewhere darker than tired, do not wait for morning. In the United States you can call or text 988 right now, at four in the morning, and a person will answer.

What is actually available before dawn

Here is what is on the table tonight, and it is deliberately small.

Not a decision about your marriage. You are five days in and running on no sleep and you are not going to reach anything true about a twenty-year marriage at four in the morning, and any conclusion arriving at this hour should be treated as weather and not as insight.

Not a conversation with her. That is yours and it is not this page's business and there is no timetable anybody should put on you.

What is available is one sentence said out loud about yourself that has nothing to do with any of this, and one name. That is the whole of tonight, and it is not a small thing, because a man who says one true sentence from outside the subject has just proven to himself that there is an outside.

You have something to do that is the right size for four in the morning, and it is enough. Scripture says put thou my tears into thy bottle, and it is written as a request from somebody in the middle of it rather than as a report from somebody safely out the other side; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept you at that table rather than upstairs staring at a ceiling for the fifth night.

So the kitchen is not empty. It is a table, a cup made at three-fifteen, a light over the stove, and a man who is being kept count of by somebody who does not sleep.