The Stairs, Twice A Night

There are thirteen treads and the fourth from the top pops if you put your weight on the outside edge, so Ovella keeps to the wall side going up.

The night light on the landing is a little shell shaped thing plugged into the baseboard, and it throws about as much light as a candle in a jar. It is enough. She has not needed the hall switch in two years. She knows the whole trip in the dark now, the way you know the way to your own mailbox: rail, turn, the flat part where the boards are cold, the doorway.

The first trip is usually around half past midnight, before she has properly gone under. That one is not so bad. She is still more or less awake, and there is a kind of briskness in her at that hour that gets the thing done and gets her back down.

The second trip is the one.

It comes somewhere between two and four, and it never announces itself the same way twice. Sometimes it is a sound from the room that is not a word, more like the front end of a word. Sometimes it is nothing at all and she is simply awake with her feet already on the floor, the body having heard something the mind did not catch.

Down she goes for what is needed. Back up she comes.

It takes eleven minutes on a good night. She has never timed it. She knows it the way she knows the treads.

And then, at the top, with the shell light on the baseboard and the house making the sounds a house makes, comes the part of the night that actually costs her something. It is not the stairs. Her legs are fine. Her legs have been up and down that staircase since the year they put the new rail on.

It is the arithmetic.

Because standing on that landing at ten past three, what runs through Ovella's head is not tonight. It is the arithmetic of it. Tomorrow night. The night after. Next winter. A number she cannot see the end of, multiplied by eleven minutes, multiplied by a body that is sixty one and not thirty. She stands there and does that math in the dark, and every single time, the math is what makes her sit down for a second on the top step with her hand on the rail.

Then she goes down. And she does not sleep for a while, and then she does, and the alarm goes at six, and it is Thursday.

He will need it again tomorrow. She knows that. She has never once resented the eleven minutes.

Maybe there are no stairs in your house. But there is something you get up and do, and you have done it so many times you no longer think about the doing of it. And what wears the finish off you is not the act. It is the moment afterward when your mind runs the total forward, out past this week, out past this year, and hands you a figure. And the thing you have never said out loud, not to anybody, is what you feel standing there holding that figure at three in the morning.

It Was Never The Stairs

I want to separate two things that have been welded together in you for a long time, because once they come apart you can breathe.

There is the trip. Eleven minutes, thirteen treads, a rail, a door. That is a real thing and it costs a real amount and you have been paying it without complaint.

And then there is the total. The forward number, the one nobody assigned you and no one is collecting. That is the thing standing on the landing with you, and it weighs more than everything you actually carried tonight.

You are worn down by a sum, not by a staircase. Ask why the total weighs more than the climb. Psalm 127:2 has the answer written out already, and the Spirit is not standing on your landing asking you to solve anything before morning.

"It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep."Psalm 127:2

Now hear what that verse is not saying, because a tired woman can read it wrong in half a second and be flattened by it. It is not calling your night vain. It is not telling you the trips up are wasted effort or that a better woman would rest more. There is no scolding anywhere in that line, and if you heard one, it was not coming from the text.

The vanity is the calculating. It is the sitting up late doing sums about a supply you cannot see, eating what the old translation beautifully calls the bread of sorrows, which is exactly what a person chews on at ten past three. And the answer God gives is not a strategy. It is a gift, handed over in the dark: so he giveth his beloved sleep.

You have been trying to pre pay a year of nights out of tonight's strength, and that has never once been how He supplies it. That is written, not encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is what puts it under a woman at three in the morning.

The Watch Was Always Being Kept

Here is what I want you to know about the hours you are awake in.

Scripture keeps coming back to this, that the One who keeps His people does not doze off while He is doing it. He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep, says Psalm 121:4, and that is not poetry about how attentive God is. It is a plain statement about who is awake in your house at three in the morning, and it is not only you.

You have been keeping a watch that God has been keeping alongside you the entire time. The Spirit has been on that landing every night this year, and it is written into Psalm 121:4 in four flat words: He shall not slumber.

Think about how the manna came. Not a year's worth. Not a month, stacked in a shed, so the arithmetic could finally be done and the mind put at rest. A day at a time, appearing in the night, gathered in the morning, and the portion that got hoarded went bad by noon. God has never once handed anybody the year. He hands out the day, and the reason is not stinginess, it is that He intends to be there tomorrow when tomorrow needs its own portion.

You are living on a daily supply, and running out is not what is happening to you. You do not have to take that from me. His word says He gives His beloved sleep, and the Spirit is what carries a promise like that into a dark hallway where nobody is watching.

And one thing has to be said plainly here, because this category is where it matters most. All of this is written for a house where the trouble is need. If what is happening in your house is not need but harm, if somebody is hurting you or frightening you, endurance is not the word for that and mercy has never once meant staying to be hurt. Getting yourself help is the right move and it is not a failure of patience. Tell somebody today. Nothing on this page asks you to stay anywhere that is damaging you.