The Two O'Clock Phone

He has never let it ring out. Not once in nineteen years.

That is the fact he would give you if you asked, and he would give it flatly, without any pride in it, because to him it is not a virtue. It is just what a man does when he has a truck and a set of tools and a phone number that half the county has.

A hose goes on a rig at two in the morning and it is him. A pipe lets go in somebody's crawl space in February and it is him. Once, memorably, a horse got out onto the highway at ten past three, and he was not the right person for that at all, and he went anyway because the woman who called had nobody else.

He is fifty six.

He sleeps in about four hour pieces now, which he says is age. It is not age. It is nineteen years of a phone on the nightstand and a man who has trained himself never to be fully under.

His wife said something in the spring that he has not been able to shake. She was not angry. She said, mildly, over breakfast, that she had noticed he flinches when the phone lights up even during the day now.

He said something short and they moved on.

The sentence, unsaid: I do not know how to be a man who lets it ring.

You may know that phone. The one you have never let ring out, and the cost nobody is billing you for.

Rain is sent onto what is already weary

There is a line in the middle of a psalm about God's provision, and the order of the words in it is what matters.

Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary.Psalm 68:9

Read the last clause. When it was weary. Not before. Not after the people had recovered themselves enough to be worth confirming. The rain is sent onto ground that is already worn out, and the weariness is named as the moment rather than as a problem to be dealt with first.

And notice the word plentiful. Not sufficient. Not enough to get by on. The psalm does not describe a careful ration issued to people who have been careless with the last one.

You are the ground that rain is described as falling on, and Psalm 68:9 sends the plentiful rain specifically onto an inheritance that was weary, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a line from an old song of ascent and lands it on a man who sleeps in four hour pieces.

Confirming is not correcting

Consider the verb in the middle, because it is the one that will land on a man like him.

Confirm. Not repair. Not rebuke. Not restructure. God sends rain in order to confirm His inheritance, which means to establish it, to settle it more firmly in place, and He does that at the exact point where it is worn down.

He has spent nineteen years half expecting that if he ever ran properly dry, what would come would be an assessment. Some accounting of whether he had been sensible with himself. Psalm 68 has no accounting in it. It has weather.

You have been braced for an audit and what is described is rain, because the written word names confirmation rather than correction as what arrives on a weary inheritance, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from a nice piece of translation into something a man can actually receive.

And notice who does the sending. There is no clause in that sentence where the inheritance produces anything. It is weary, and rain comes, and the rain is described as sent, and that is the whole mechanism.

You are on the receiving end of that verb and not the working end, and Psalm 68 puts the sending entirely in God's hands, and the same Spirit who is called the rain in a dozen other places is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Nineteen years of broken sleep and a phone a man has trained himself never to be fully under is not a badge, and it is doing something to a body at fifty six whether or not it is being felt yet. Tell a doctor plainly about the four hour pieces and the flinch, and use the word sleep rather than the word tired, because one of those gets taken seriously and the other one does not. Ask whether there is another number that could take the two o'clock calls one night a week, which is a small ask and a large change. And if his wife raises it again, take it as information rather than as a complaint, because she has been watching the flinch for longer than he has.

And if the exhaustion has begun going somewhere heavier than exhaustion, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Handing a night over is not a reduction in reliability. You are held exactly as much on the night you let it ring as on the nineteen years you never did, because Psalm 68:9 sends rain onto weariness rather than onto performance, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that true in the body rather than only on the page.