Same thing at the top of every page I write on this site, and I would rather wear it out than leave it off. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page goes anywhere near the ground a clinic stands on. If somebody in your house is worrying you, get them seen and get them seen soon. That is not the nervous option. That is the right one.
Now. It is late, and everybody in the house is asleep except you.
You pulled the chair over from the wall about two hours ago. The chair is not comfortable and you have not moved it. Somebody is asleep in that bed and there is nothing to do and nothing to give and nobody to talk to, and the hours are going by one at a time.
And I know what the mind does in that chair, because I have done a fair few of those nights myself. It starts totting up the hours and calling them wasted. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. I just sat there.
He asked for the hour and He asked for nothing else
There is a night in the Gospels where the Lord Himself wanted company, and the thing He asked for is the exact thing that gets dismissed in that chair.
And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? (Matthew 26:40, King James Version)
Read what He asked for. Not advice. Not a plan. Not somebody to fix the thing coming down the road at Him, which nobody could have. One hour of somebody being awake nearby.
That is the whole request. And the disappointment in it is not that they failed to solve anything. It is that they were not awake.
You are giving the one thing that was asked for in that garden, and it has never once been the lesser kind of help. Matthew 26:40 has the Son of God name an hour of company as what He wanted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a tired person in a hard chair hear that as an actual answer.
I find that steadying at about three in the morning. The highest request ever made of a friend was not a skill. It was a person staying awake in the same place.
You have not been doing nothing out there, and heaven has never once measured an hour by what got accomplished inside it. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person in a chair when nothing is happening, and it is written that the asking was for watching rather than for working.
The hours with nothing in them are the hours
Let me say something plain about what care actually is, because I think a lot of us learned it wrong from television.
Care is not mostly moments. There are almost no moments. There is one good conversation in ten nights, if that. The rest of it is a person in a room, the light down low, somebody asleep and somebody not.
And that ratio is not a failure of the care. That is the shape of it. The moments come out of the hours; they do not replace them.
You were given the hours and not the moments, and God has never once handed a household the highlights only. Matthew 26:40 asks for an hour of watching with nothing in it and treats the hour itself as the gift, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stop waiting for the night to justify itself.
I have a neighbor who sat with his wife through most of a winter. He said the thing nobody warns you about is how boring it is, and how guilty he felt for finding it boring.
You are allowed to find the long hours long, and nothing about that has ever once been a fault in your love. The Spirit of God is the one who is honest with a person about their own tiredness, and what is written records disciples who could not stay awake and a Lord who kept them anyway.
The plain routing, which is not a comfort
Here is the one part of this page that is not comfort, and it goes here on purpose, because a page about sitting up all night is exactly where somebody could mistake me for saying that the chair is enough. It is not.
If something frightening is happening right now, you call 911, and you do it before you finish this page. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and it is a person and not a recording. And if the one in that bed has been going on this way and nobody qualified has looked at them, you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist in the morning, and you describe what you have actually seen rather than the tidy version.
You are not choosing between staying up and getting somebody seen, and those two have never once been in competition. Matthew 26:40 asks for a watch and does not ask for a rescue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from turning faithfulness into a reason to wait.
The night chair is a good thing. It is not an assessment and neither am I. Somebody qualified can do that, and the morning is soon enough to ring them and not one hour later.
You have a call to make as well as a chair to sit in, and the passage has never once ranked the two against each other. The Spirit of God is the one who gets somebody as far as a phone at nine in the morning, and what is written puts the watching beside the world going on rather than instead of it.
So here is the word I came with, and it is for one person in a hard chair.
You are not wasting these nights, and the hours you have sat through have never once gone down as empty. I am not making you feel better. Matthew 26:40 has Jesus ask for one hour of somebody being awake nearby, and the disappointment in the garden is about sleeping and not about failing to fix anything, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my telling who takes a false ledger off a tired person at three in the morning.
And this, which is the line I want left standing:
You were asked for the watching, and the watching is the assignment rather than what you do until the real one turns up. The Spirit of God is the one who is awake in a room where nothing is happening, and what is written names an hour of company as the thing the Lord Himself wanted on His hardest night.
If you want one sentence to keep for the rest of that shift, keep this one: What I can do here is not nothing, and the hours I sat through were counted whether anything happened in them or not.
Declare this over yourself
- Ledger in my head, you are not an accurate record of these nights. Matthew 26:40 has the Lord ask for one hour of watching and nothing else, so by the Holy Spirit you do not get to write my hours off, in the name of Jesus.
- Boredom of the long dark, you have no authority to tell me what my care is worth. The written word asks for the staying awake and never once for a word to be spoken, and by the Holy Spirit I am finished grading myself on what happened.
- Father, You asked for an hour once and You meant it plainly. Your word says could ye not watch with me one hour, so by Your Spirit I pull the chair up tonight, and in the morning I make the call.
Matthew 26:40
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