I Am Fine Until About Ten

It is fine until about ten.

The day works. You get up, you go, you talk to people, you are perfectly convincing and none of it is a performance. That is the thing worth saying clearly: the daytime is not fake. You genuinely are all right at two in the afternoon.

And then somewhere between about half past nine and eleven, it arrives.

It is not dramatic. It is a slow drop, and then a heaviness, and then a stretch of an hour or two where everything about being here feels wrong and the idea of another eight months of this is unbearable.

And then you sleep, and then it is morning, and by about nine you are fine again.

Six weeks of that.

And here is what has quietly happened along the way, and it is the reason for this piece: you have decided which one is real.

The nights. Because they feel more honest. Because a person crying at eleven seems more true than a person laughing at two, and because there is an old and wrong idea in most people that whatever is worst is whatever is most accurate.

Weeping may endure for a night

There is a line in Psalm 30 that is quoted constantly and almost always as a promise, and there is something else in it that matters more.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5, King James Version)

Look at the shape rather than the promise.

Weeping is given a night. Joy is given a morning. They are put in a sequence, both of them real, both of them located in a specific part of the day, and neither one is described as the true state with the other one as an illusion.

That is a description of a twenty four hour period containing two entirely different things, which is exactly what you have been living for six weeks.

You are living in a day that is built to contain both, and a night that is genuinely hard has never once made the morning that follows it a lie. The Holy Spirit is the one in a room at eleven at night in the sixth week, and Psalm 30:5 puts the two in sequence and calls both of them real.

And notice the verb attached to the weeping. Endure.

It endures for a night. That word grants it duration and weight. It is not dismissed, it is not minimized, and nobody in that verse is told that the weeping was an overreaction.

It is given a whole night and then it is given an end.

You have a night that Scripture grants weight to, and something given a whole night in the book has never once been an overreaction in anybody. The written word gives the weeping duration before it gives it a limit, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a hard hour be as heavy as it actually is.

The night is not more honest

Now let me take apart the conclusion itself, because it is the load bearing error.

There is a belief, widely held and almost never examined, that the worst version of a day is the accurate one. That the person at eleven, with the defenses down and the tiredness in, is seeing clearly, and the person at two in the afternoon is being distracted by activity.

It is the wrong way round.

At eleven at night a person is tired, alone, unstimulated, and physically at the lowest point of a twenty four hour cycle. That is not a clearer view. That is a view taken through a specific and predictable filter, at the same hour, every day, which is the definition of a distortion rather than a revelation.

You are looking through a filter at the same hour every night, and a view that arrives on a schedule has never once been a clearer view than any other. Psalm 30:5 locates the weeping in the night rather than in the truth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person what an hour is actually doing to them.

And here is the second half, which is the one that will free something.

The two o'clock version is not a performance.

It has been assumed to be, and the word fraud has been applied on that basis, and the entire assumption rests on the idea that only one of them can be genuine. But the laughing at lunch was genuine. Nobody was being deceived. The person who found that thing funny was the same person who cannot sleep at eleven.

A hard hour is not a verdict on a person.

You are not a fraud in the daylight, and laughing at two in the afternoon has never once been a performance put on for anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person back the half of their own day they had written off, and the written word grants both the night and the morning without ranking their honesty.

Name the hour to one person

So here is the thing to do, and the second half of it is what makes it work.

Tell one person that the nights are the hard part. And name the hour out loud when you say it.

The hour matters enormously. It is the difference between a vague statement about how things are going and a specific piece of information about a life.

I am fine until about ten. That is a sentence somebody can actually do something with.

You are able to hand somebody a specific hour, and a piece of accurate information has never once been the same as a complaint about how things are going. It is written in Psalm 30:5 that weeping endures for a night and joy comes in the morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when somebody says a time out loud.

Here is what naming the hour does that a general statement cannot.

It makes it a pattern rather than a personality. A person who says I am struggling has described themselves. A person who says it starts at about half past nine has described a thing that happens, and things that happen at particular times are manageable, discussable, and above all not the whole of who somebody is.

And it lets the other person be useful. Somebody who knows the hour can ring at ten, which is worth more than any amount of general concern.

You are able to describe a pattern instead of a person, and a thing that happens at a particular hour has never once been the same as a thing that is true about you. Scripture puts the weeping into a night rather than into a character, and the same Spirit who located it there is with you when you say the time out loud.

And if what comes at ten has stopped being homesickness, if it has started to carry thoughts about not being here at all, do not wait for morning to decide about that. Tell somebody today, out loud, in person if you can, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are. That is not an overreaction and it is not a verdict on you. It is the same instruction, said louder.