The Only One Still Awake

Ten past two, and he is on the landing with his hand flat on a door he is not going to open.

The house has that particular quality it only has at this hour, where the fridge downstairs is the loudest thing in it and the radiator pipe ticks once, somewhere, for no reason. A street light through the window at the end. The carpet on the third stair that has needed fixing since before any of this started.

His father is behind that door. Has been for three years, since the fall and the hospital and the conversation with the daughter who lives too far away and the decision that was never really a decision, just a series of Tuesdays that ended with a bed in the back room.

He is not going in. Going in wakes him. He is standing with his palm on the wood and his head slightly turned, doing the thing he does eleven or twelve times a night, which is listening for the breathing.

He can hear it. Good. He takes his hand off the door.

And then he does not go back to bed, because he never goes straight back to bed. He stands on the landing another minute in the cold, because there is a thought that lives out here and it has to be gone through before he can lie down, and it goes like this:

If I am not listening, nobody is.

He would not say it in daylight. In daylight he is a reasonable man who knows about carers and pagers and the fact that people sleep in houses with elderly parents all over the world every single night. But at ten past two on a landing, the reasonable man is asleep and the other one is awake, and the other one believes that the reason there has been no catastrophe in three years is that he has been on duty for eleven hundred nights without a single one off.

He goes back to bed. He will do this again at half past three.

That is you. Your landing might be a phone left face up, or a monitor, or a habit of checking a location on a map, or a list of names you go through every night in the same order because the one night you skipped one you could not settle.

Two plain things before anything else. If your version of this includes somebody frightening you or hurting you, nothing on this page is telling you to stay on duty and absorb it; tell one person today who can act, your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come and sit down with you. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the sister who lives too far away. Not the man behind the door. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Somebody says it out loud to a frightened room

There is a sentence spoken to a king who had just done the arithmetic on an army and found the answer unsurvivable, and it lands on a landing at ten past two better than almost anything else in Scripture.

Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's.2 Chronicles 20:15

Read the last six words slowly, because everything is in them and most of us have only ever heard the first half.

The battle is not yours, but God's.

Not: the battle is yours and He will help. Not: the battle is yours and He is with you in it, which is the version most of us were handed and which leaves the whole weight exactly where it was. The battle is not yours. It has an owner and the owner is not the man on the landing.

And the room this was said in was not a room full of people who were failing to try. Jehoshaphat had gathered everybody. He had fasted. He had prayed one of the most honest prayers in the whole of Scripture, which ends with a man saying out loud that he has no idea what to do. It is into that, and not into laziness, that the sentence arrives.

You are not the reason nothing has happened yet, and you were never carrying the outcome of this house. That is not a comforting thought handed to a tired man in the dark: 2 Chronicles 20:15 gives the battle an owner in plain words, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a released thing stay released in a body that has been on duty for eleven hundred nights rather than the amount of alertness anybody can produce at two in the morning.

Handing it back is not the same as walking away

Now the fear underneath, and it should be said out loud rather than walked around.

The fear is that if he stops listening, he has stopped loving. That the vigilance and the love are one substance, and that setting down the first sets down the second. Three years have fused them so thoroughly that he can no longer tell you where one ends.

They are not one substance and Scripture never treats them as one.

Handing a thing back to God is not withdrawal from it. The man who stops standing on the landing does not stop being his father's son. He stops being his father's guarantor, which is a post he was never appointed to, that nobody in his family ever asked him to take, and that he has been holding for three years without relief.

You have not been the last thing standing between the people you love and disaster. The written word says the battle belongs to God and says it to people who had already done everything, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying what a man is not built to carry, never the man's stamina.

And let me be exact about the thing that matters most here, because somebody has been quietly carrying it for years. Nothing about what happens in that back room is a report on how well you have listened. If something hard comes, it will not be because you slept. Nobody buys an outcome with vigilance and nobody forfeits one by resting. That arithmetic is not in Scripture anywhere, and where it has been implied to you it was implied wrongly.

You have not been sitting an examination that God was administering at two in the morning. The word hands the battle to Him in a sentence with no conditions attached, and His Spirit has been holding that house every one of the eleven hundred nights.