The First Train Out

He is on the 5:14 and he has nowhere to be until half past seven.

Four people in the whole car. A cleaner working down from the far end with a yellow bucket and a wringer on wheels, moving at the speed of a man with the entire day ahead of him. A woman asleep across two seats with her coat rolled under her head. The conductor, who came through once, looked at the ticket, nodded, and said nothing at all, and it was the kindest thing anybody had done for him in nine days.

He took a backward facing seat by the window out of habit, and the window at 5:14 is not a window. It is a mirror with a train in it. He can see his own face floating out there over the fields he knows are there, and the reflected line of ceiling lights running away behind him, and nothing else.

He has been awake since three.

Not three thirty. Three, the way it has been every night since Tuesday, when they took what they took and told him somebody would call in the middle of next week. Since Tuesday the hours between three and five have belonged to a single activity, and he would be ashamed to describe it to anyone. He rehearses the phone call. He has now had that call forty different ways in the dark. He has heard the voice be gentle. He has heard it be brisk. He has worked out what he would say to his sister, and in what order he would tell people, and whether he would tell the people at work at all, and what he would do about the trip in October.

None of it has happened. Every one of those calls he has taken, he has taken for nothing, and he will still have to take the real one once, whatever it is.

So at twenty past four he gave up on the bed, put his coat on over yesterday's shirt, and walked to the station, because the house was not moving and the train was.

And then, somewhere past the third stop, the thing happens that he came for without knowing he came for it. The window stops being a mirror. His own face fades out of it, and the black behind the glass turns a gray so thin you would argue about whether it is there, and then there is a line of fields, and then, low along the edge of everything, the color comes.

He did not do that. He watched it. He has been watching for it since three o'clock and it did not arrive one minute sooner for the watching, and it did not require his permission, and it came.

That is you, perhaps, in your own 3 a.m., in your own backward facing seat. There is a day next week with a phone call in it. You have already taken that call more times than you can count, and none of them counted, and you are so tired of your own mind that you would get on any train that was moving.

More than they that watch for the morning

There is a line in the Psalms that belongs to people who are awake at three, and I think it was written by one of them.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:6

He says it twice. Whoever wrote that liked the phrase enough to put it down and then say it again, which is what a person does at four in the morning when a sentence is the only solid thing in the room.

Look at who he picks for the comparison. Not a man hoping for the morning. Not a man wondering whether the morning will come this time. A watchman: somebody standing on a wall through the coldest part of the night, whose entire job is the last watch, and who has never in his life been surprised by a sunrise. The morning is not in question for him. Only the hour of it is. He does not make it come. He does not know the minute. And nobody grades him on how gracefully he waited.

Now here is the part I want to be exact about, because this is where these pages usually cheat. The psalm does not say the news will be good. It says nothing about the news at all. The morning the watchman waits for is the Lord Himself, and the certainty in that line is a certainty about God and never a forecast about a phone call.

I will not tell you what that call is going to say. I do not know. Nobody who writes to you knows, and any page that hints at it in either direction is selling you something.

You are waiting for the Lord and He is not in doubt, whatever else in this week is. Psalm 130:6 puts that in writing, twice, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a watchman's line off a wall in the ancient world and lays it across a train seat at ten past five.

What the rehearsing is actually doing

Let me name the thing you have been doing since three, and then let me take the blame off it.

Rehearsing the worst feels like preparation. That is why the mind does it. It presents itself as responsible: I am getting ready, I am not going to be caught out, if I have already imagined it then it cannot flatten me. And it is a lie, kindly meant by your own head. You do not get to prepay grief. You cannot use up a hard thing in advance. All that happens is that you live the bad version forty times and then, if it comes, you live it once more anyway, and you arrive at the real thing already exhausted.

But hear this clearly. That is not a faith failure and I will not have it called one. A mind under threat runs scenarios; that is what it is for, and yours is doing it faithfully and badly. Nobody in this room is short of enough faith, and no one is being kept waiting because of something they neglected to feel. That sentence is not in the book. It has been said at bedsides by people who meant well and it has never once helped.

So here is the true thing, in both halves, said at the same time. God heals. I will not soften it, because Scripture does not soften it and this site exists to say it out loud: He heals, He heals bodies, it is His character and not a rumor. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot and I will not, and I would rather be trusted next week than believed today. We say what He has already said, and the current is His to send. Keep the appointment, take the call, keep the people who are caring for your body. The God who hears you is not in competition with them.

You are not carrying next week's phone call today, and you were never given it to carry. Psalm 130:5 says the psalmist's hope was in His word, and it is His Spirit who keeps a person upright in the days between, not the number of versions of the call they have managed to survive in advance.

One more thing, because I mean it. If these nights have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking that everyone would have an easier week without you in it, tell one living human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit up with you tonight. A page cannot do that part, and you deserve a person in the room.