The Only Way The Night Ends

There is a small white tablet in a foil strip in Nathan's bedside drawer and it is the only door out of a night.

That is not how a doctor would put it. A doctor would say short term, as needed, at the lowest effective dose, and a doctor did say exactly that, four years ago, during a genuinely terrible period involving a bereavement and a job ending in the same eleven weeks.

But that is how it works in Nathan's actual life, and he has never described it to anybody in these words.

Here is what he means. It is not that he cannot sleep without it, although mostly he cannot. It is that he cannot approach a night without knowing where it is. He checks the drawer before he goes downstairs in the evening. When he travels he packs them first, before anything, and he has twice repacked a bag at an airport to be sure. If a strip is getting low, the low strip is on his mind from about Wednesday.

The tablet is not really a sleeping tablet any more. It is a guarantee that the night has an exit.

And the thought that has started to arrive, and which arrived properly last month when he could not get an appointment for nine days, is not about sleep at all.

What happens to me on the night there is not one?

That is the whole thing. Not the sleeping. The fact that he has quietly become a man who cannot walk toward a night unarmed.

And here is where I stop talking about Nathan, because you know exactly where yours is right now without getting up, and you have checked at least once today.

Let me say the first thing plainly. The problem here is not really the tablet. It is the belief that has grown up around it: that the night is a thing you have to survive by your own arrangements, and that if the arrangement fails there is nothing else between you and it.

Somebody is awake

Let me set the true thing down first, because it goes directly at the fear rather than at the drawer.

You are not the one holding the night together, and you never have been. There is Somebody awake through every hour of it, and Scripture makes the point twice in two lines because it knows a person will not believe it the first time: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

He will not suffer your foot to be moved: He that keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He that keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

Sit with the repetition, because it is deliberate. Will not slumber. Then: shall neither slumber nor sleep. The psalm says it, and then says it again more strongly, in case the reader is the kind of person who is awake at four checking a drawer.

And notice the title it gives Him. He that keeps you. Keeping is an active job, done all night, by somebody who is not asleep. Which means the vigilance you have been supplying, and the arrangement you have been guaranteeing, has been duplicated work all along. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

So the night has a keeper, and it is not you, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own comfort, and God's Spirit does not go off duty at eleven.

The exit is not the problem, the fear is

Now let me name what is actually happening, because it is not what you would put on a form.

You are not dependent on a tablet in the simple sense. You are dependent on the certainty of a tablet. The proof is that the worst night in four years was not a night without sleep, it was nine days waiting for an appointment while the strip got low, and you slept badly all nine because of what might happen rather than because of what was happening.

That is fear doing the work, and fear is treatable, and it responds to being named accurately.

And here is the ground under you while you name it: you are already kept. Not going to be kept, on the night the strip runs out. Kept now, and kept last night, and kept on all the nights you thought the tablet did it. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can lie down on rather than a thing you find comforting in daylight.

And now the practical half, and I will be exact, because getting this wrong is dangerous. Do not stop this on your own and do not skip a night to test yourself. This class of medicine in particular can be genuinely dangerous to come off abruptly, and testing yourself is exactly the wrong experiment. What changes it is a conversation with your prescriber, and the sentence they need is not I think I am hooked. It is I check the drawer before I go downstairs, I pack them first, and the nine days waiting for an appointment last month were worse than any bad night I have had. That is precise clinical information and it will change what they offer you, and there is real help for the fear underneath it too. And if you are ever in danger, if you have taken more than you meant to, or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.