My Body Knew Before I Did

You have been waking at about ten past four.

Not every night. Enough nights that you have stopped being surprised by it, and you have started to know the sound the house makes at that hour, which is a thing nobody sets out to learn.

You have blamed several things. Coffee. The room being warm. That you looked at a screen too late. All of those are plausible and one of them may even be true, and none of them explains why it started in the first week of October and did not happen once in July.

Your stomach has been doing something too. Not pain exactly. A kind of low tightness that arrives with no announcement and leaves without one, and that you have got very used to working around.

Here is what I want to say to you, and I want it in before anything else, because I think you have been treating your own body as a nuisance for about six weeks.

Your body is not malfunctioning. It is reporting.

It has read something. It has matched the light, or a date, or a sentence somebody said in passing, against every version of this it has already lived through, and it has begun making preparations. It is doing that early because it has learned that early is useful. And it is telling you, in the only language it has, which is sleep and appetite and a tightness under the ribs.

The trouble is that nobody ever taught us to read it, so it arrives as a symptom to be managed rather than a message to be opened.

My bones are vexed

There is a psalm that does something almost no religious writing does. It reports a body.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed. (Psalm 6:2, King James Version)

My bones are vexed. Not my spirit is troubled. Not I am concerned about a situation. His bones. The physical fact of him, described plainly, in a prayer, out loud, in the book the people of God sang together.

And nobody in the psalm tells him he is being self indulgent. Nobody suggests he has a sleep hygiene problem. The description of the body stands, uncorrected, as a legitimate thing to bring to God.

That means the tightness under your ribs is admissible. It is not a distraction from the real spiritual issue. It is evidence, and it was allowed into the prayer book on purpose.

You are permitted to bring a body to God rather than only a mood, and it is written into Psalm 6:2 that a man's bones were part of what he prayed about. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that permission something you can act on at ten past four rather than a fact about ancient poetry.

And notice what else that psalm does not do. It does not resolve in the next line.

You have never once been required to arrive with a tidy account of yourself, and Scripture preserves a description of a vexed body without smoothing it over. Psalm 6:2 is a plain report and nothing more, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the hour where a person has no explanation ready.

Reading what it has been saying

So let us treat the last six weeks as information rather than as inconvenience.

Your body has been answering a question. The question is what is coming and how bad is it. And the answer it has produced, in sleep and appetite, is: bad enough to start early.

That is worth taking seriously, and not in an alarming way. It does not mean the day will be terrible. It means that something in the past few of these left a mark deep enough that a system underneath your conscious mind decided it was worth losing sleep over.

You were never being weak about this, and the written word treats a vexed body as evidence rather than as a complaint to be got past. Psalm 6:2 puts the physical report inside the prayer instead of outside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman take her own ten past four seriously without being frightened by it.

Now the useful part, and it is a question rather than an instruction. When you wake at ten past four, what is actually there? Not the general dread. What is the first specific thing your mind lands on before it starts running?

For most people it is remarkably consistent. It is one person. Or one hour. Or one piece of arithmetic. It has been the same thing for weeks, arriving in the same shape at the same hour, and it has never once been written down, because at ten past four nobody writes anything down.

You have been handed the same specific thing every night for six weeks, and Scripture does not have God ignoring the report a body makes about what is coming. Psalm 6:2 brings the bones into the room, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman in the dark when the same sentence arrives again.

One line while you are awake

Here is the whole of what I am asking, and it is not a plan for sleeping better.

Write one line, tonight, while the house is still up and the evening is ordinary, naming what your body has been telling you.

Something like: my body has been waking me about my sister. Or: I have not slept properly since the letter came about the money. Or simply: something about the second week of December is keeping me awake and I do not know what.

That last one counts. You are not required to know the answer to write the line.

You are able to write down a question you cannot answer, and it is written into Psalm 6:2 that a person may bring a body and no explanation at all. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a kitchen table where somebody is putting an honest sentence on paper in the evening rather than in the small hours.

And here is what the line does, which is different from what you might expect. It does not make you sleep. I am not promising you that and I will not.

What it does is give the four o'clock thing somewhere to be. At the moment it has no address, so it turns up in the only place available, which is your bed. Written down, it exists somewhere else, and a great many people find that the visit at ten past four gets shorter once the thing has an address in daylight.

You were never meant to hold this only in the dark, and the written word keeps a man's plain physical report on the page where it can be looked at. Psalm 6:2 says my bones are vexed in the daylight of a written psalm, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a thing out of the small hours and onto paper.