I Count Them When I Cannot Sleep

It is always the same order.

That is the detail that nobody mentions and everybody recognizes. The list does not arrive scrambled. It arrives in the order it has always arrived in, starting with the same one, and it runs through to the end, and then it starts again.

And it is always around two. Not always exactly two, but in that zone where the house is completely silent and the day is too far away to be any help.

So now there is a second problem sitting on top of the first one, and the second problem is the hour itself. You go to bed already knowing what is coming. Some part of you is braced for two before you have even turned the light off, and bracing is not rest.

The list is not the enemy here and I want to be clear about that. Every item on it is a real thing. It is not anxiety inventing work. The work exists.

What has gone wrong is that nowhere else in your life is that list actually held, so the only place it gets held is in a dark room by a woman who is trying to sleep.

You are a woman who has been keeping a list nobody asked her to keep, and running it at two in the morning has never once been the same as caring about your house.

I will both lay me down in peace

There is a line at the end of the fourth psalm that is about going to bed, and about who stays awake through the night.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8, King James Version)

For thou, LORD, only.

That word only is doing the whole job. It is not saying God helps with the keeping. It is saying He is the one doing it, singly, and that the man saying the line has stopped adding himself to the roster.

Which is exactly what has not happened in your house. At two in the morning there are two of you awake, and one of you does not need to be.

You have been keeping a watch that was never once assigned to you, and the word only in that verse has never included the woman lying in the dark. Psalm 4:8 puts the keeping on one party and names the party, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person off a roster they put themselves on.

And look at the structure of what he says. I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep. Two separate things, named separately.

Lying down and sleeping are not the same act, and anybody who has done a great deal of the first and very little of the second knows precisely how separate they are.

You have been doing the laying down without the sleeping, and the psalm has never once treated those two as automatically arriving together. The Spirit of God is the one who gives the second half, and Psalm 4:8 names both parts because the writer knew the difference too.

Why it runs at two and not at six

So here is the practical part, and it is about storage rather than about worry.

A list that is not written down has to be rehearsed to be retained. That is simply how memory works. Anything a person is afraid of losing gets recited, and the reciting has to happen when there is nothing else competing for the channel.

Two in the morning is the only time in a twenty four hour day when nothing else is competing.

You are running a rehearsal and not a worry, and a mind holding an unwritten list has never once had another hour available to do it in. Psalm 4:8 hands the keeping to the LORD only, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it safe for a woman to stop rehearsing.

And that explains the order, which is the part that unsettles people most. It is always the same order because a rehearsal is a rehearsal. It is not a judgment being read out. It is a file being read through, in the order it was written.

You were never being accused at two in the morning, and a list that arrives in the same order every night has never once been a verdict being repeated. The Spirit of God is the one who can tell a recitation from an indictment, and the written word puts the whole of the keeping onto somebody who does not need reminding.

And here is the practical consequence, and it is the reason the assignment below is what it is. A written list does not need to be rehearsed. Paper holds it. The channel goes quiet.

You have a page that can do the holding tonight, and a list on paper has never once needed to be recited to survive until morning. Psalm 4:8 says thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in that room when a woman stops carrying what she has written down.

One page, and put it in another room

Here is the assignment and it has two halves and the second half is the one that works.

Before bed, write every unfinished thing on one page. Not a to do list with dates. Just the items, in whatever order they come, however many there are.

Write all of them. The ones that feel too trivial to write down go on as well, because those are the ones that come back at two.

You have a hand that can empty a list onto a page in four minutes, and writing a thing down has never once obliged you to do it. Psalm 4:8 hands the keeping over entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one at that table while a woman writes out nineteen things and does none of them.

Then here is the second half. Take the page out of the bedroom. Kitchen table, a drawer downstairs, anywhere that is not the room you sleep in.

Do not keep it by the bed. A page by the bed is still on the roster. A page in another room is being held somewhere else, and somewhere else is the whole point.

Then go to bed without it, and if the list starts anyway, say out loud that it is on the page in the kitchen, and let that be the answer.