I Wait For Her To Fall Asleep

Nasir has learned the sound of his wife's breathing changing.

There is a point, usually about eighteen minutes after the light goes off, where it drops and lengthens and goes from the breathing of a woman thinking about tomorrow to the breathing of a woman who is gone. He knows it the way you know a car pulling into your own drive.

He waits for it every night.

Not with excitement. That is the thing he would want somebody to understand, if there were anybody to tell. There is no anticipation in it. It is closer to how a man waits for a train he does not want to catch and will catch anyway.

She is two feet away. They have been married nine years. They are, by any measure anybody outside could apply, happy: they laugh, they plan, they raise two children, they are kind to each other in the small hourly ways that actually make a marriage. He is not unhappy in his marriage and this is not a story about a cold woman.

And every night he lies in the dark counting eighteen minutes.

Here is the part that has begun to frighten him, and it is not the act. He could talk himself around the act; he has been doing that for six years. What has begun to frighten him is that he has noticed himself, in the daytime, being slightly careful with her. Not distant. Careful. Choosing a word. Not quite meeting something in a conversation. Turning very slightly away when she is warm with him for no reason.

I have not gone anywhere. But I am further away from her than I was, and I am the one who moved.

And here is where I stop talking about Nasir, because you have your own eighteen minutes, and the thing that worries you now is not the screen. It is the carefulness.

Let me say the first thing plainly, and I am going to say it in your favor: the distance is not evidence that you love her less. It is what a person does when they are carrying something they believe would end them if it were seen. You did not stop loving her. You started guarding.

He is not shocked by you

Let me put the strongest thing down first, because everything else depends on it and you have never once believed it.

You are not too much for God. There is no expression on His face. You have never in six years told Him anything He had to absorb, and the throne you have been avoiding at half past eleven at night is not braced for what you are about to say.

I would not dare invent that. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a dark bedroom:

For we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses; but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:15-16

Watch what those two verses do together, because they are a single argument and it is aimed exactly at you.

First: the One you would have to go to has been tempted in all points. Not observed it. Been in it. Which means there is nothing you could describe that would be new information at that throne.

And second, immediately: therefore come boldly. The word therefore is doing the work. Because He is not shocked, approach is not a humiliation. It is not a man crawling in to be inspected. It is a man walking in to get help in the hour he needs it.

So the room you have been staying out of is open, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own hope, and God's Spirit is not waiting up to be disappointed in you. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

The distance is the wound

Now let me name what is actually being damaged, because if we aim at the act we will miss it.

You have been thinking of this as a thing you do at half past eleven. It is not. The real cost is being paid at four in the afternoon, in the daytime, in the carefulness, in a hundred small turnings away that neither of you could name and both of you can feel.

That is what secrecy does. It does not merely hide a thing. It moves a person, an inch at a time, out of reach of the people they love, because a man who is guarding cannot be fully present. Those are different postures and a body cannot hold both.

And here is the thing that has to be said in the same breath, because getting this wrong has broken marriages: I am not telling you to go and tell your wife tonight. Nobody has the right to make that the price of your freedom. It may be right for you, and it may be right with help, and it may be right later. That is a decision made with wisdom and with someone who knows what they are doing, and it is not a toll at a gate.

What I am telling you is that you are already fully known by God and already not rejected, and there is nothing about you He has been shown and walked away from. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can rest your weight on rather than a thing you assent to.

And the practical half, because a message without it has failed you: there is real help for this and none of it is small faith. A counselor who works with this specifically. A doctor if the sleep or the low afterward has got heavy. One person, not your wife, who simply knows and does not flinch. That is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number.