The Four In The Morning Prayer

It always comes at four. Never three, never five. Four, and the same worry sitting up in the dark before he is properly awake, as if it had been waiting in the room with the door open.

Two years of that.

He prays there. Not out of discipline. There is nothing else to do at four in the morning with a mind that has already started, so he lies still and puts it up, quietly, without moving, because moving wakes the house.

And nothing comes back. That is the part he has stopped mentioning even to himself. Two years of the most honest praying of his life, done flat on his back in the dark with no audience and no performance in it, and not one word in reply.

He has started to think of four o'clock as a place rather than a time. A room he gets taken to. And lately he has begun to suspect that the reason nothing comes back is something about him that he cannot see from inside it.

If four o'clock has been waking you, lie still a minute and listen. I am not going to tell you what your dark means, and I am not going to hand you a technique for sleeping through it.

I have no explanation and I will not build one

Let us clear this first, because a braced man hears nothing, and the title will have braced you.

I do not know why nothing has come back. Neither does anybody who tells you they do, and the ones who are certain about your two years have not lain through any of them.

I am not going to say the silence is discipline. I am not going to say it is a purifying, or a delay with a purpose you will thank Him for, or a wound He is working on quietly, or a signal you have been too dulled to catch. All of those hand the dark back to a man as his own doing, dressed as depth. That is the fastest way to hurt somebody at four in the morning and it is done with great sincerity every day.

You are not shut out. Two years of quiet is not God turning His face away from you, and it has never once been a verdict on your soul. That is not my read of it. The written word says that the darkness and the light are both alike to thee (Psalm 139:12), which is a sentence about His sight and not about your visibility, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a bedroom at four with everybody else asleep.

The book keeps a man who could not sleep

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a strategy for the hour.

Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot speak.Psalm 77:4

Read that slowly. A man in the songbook says he cannot sleep and cannot get words out, and he says it in the same collection people sang from together. Nobody thought the sleepless were a special embarrassing case to be handled off to one side. It went in with the harvest songs and the victory songs and stayed there.

You have not dropped out of the company of praying people because you pray lying down in the dark with nothing coming back. The Word calls that prayer, plainly and by name, and it never once made the reply the test of it. That is written and kept deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has begun to suspect himself.

The hour is not a verdict on the person

Something needs saying about four o'clock itself, because it has taken on a meaning it has not earned.

An hour cannot know anything about you. It has no opinion. What four in the morning actually is, in your body, is a low point in a daily cycle of hormones and blood sugar and sleep pressure, and every dread you own is heavier there than it will be at nine, and none of that is a spiritual reading.

You are not weaker at four than you are at noon, and God is not further off there. The nearness is not on a timer. Scripture says he that keepeth thee will not slumber (Psalm 121:3), which is a claim about who stays awake, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps that true in the exact hour when your own strength is at its thinnest.

And if the four o'clock hour has got darker than you have said out loud, if the worry has turned into something heavier, if you are frightened for yourself, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not stepping around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people, and using it is sense rather than surrender.