The light above her has been on the whole time and it has never once felt like light.
That is the strange thing about three in the morning in a place like this. It is not dark. There is a strip light every four meters and a sign glowing over a door and a machine somewhere with a green readout. There is more light in this corridor than in her whole house.
And none of it does what light is supposed to do.
She has noticed something over the last few hours, and it has started to unsettle her: everything is worse now than it was at ten. The same facts. The same door. Nothing has changed and everything is heavier, and thoughts she could hold at a normal size in the evening have quietly doubled while she sat here.
At about half two she realized she had stopped praying at some point and could not remember when, and the thought that followed it was the one that has stayed: maybe He is further away at this hour.
That is your corridor. That is your three o'clock. And I want to answer that, because it is one of the oldest feelings there is and there is a psalm that goes straight at it.
Alike to Him
David is describing what it would take to get away from God, and he tries the dark, because the dark is where everybody's mind goes.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12
The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
Not that God can manage in the dark. Not that He copes. That the difference between three in the morning and three in the afternoon, which is enormous to you and me, is not a difference to Him at all.
You are as visible to Him now as you were at ten. Not less accessible, not further off, not harder to reach. The written word says the two conditions are alike to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live fact in a corridor at three rather than a nice line about God's abilities.
Now let me name what is actually happening to you tonight, because it is real and it is not spiritual.
A body at three in the morning is a different instrument from the same body at ten. Everything is heavier, everything is nearer, everything is less survivable. That is not your faith failing. That is what the small hours do to a human being, and every night nurse in that building knows it and would tell you the same thing.
You are not further from God because you feel further. The written word makes His nearness a fact about Him rather than a reading off your own condition. The Holy Spirit does not recede at midnight and return at breakfast.
And the praying that stopped somewhere around half two.
You did not abandon anything. You ran out. There is a point in a long night where a person stops producing sentences, and it is exhaustion rather than distance, and the psalm does not require you to keep talking in order to remain in view.
You are seen by Him while you are past words. The night shineth as the day, and the shining is not something you generate. The Holy Spirit has been in this corridor through the hour where you stopped, and He did not leave when the words did.
The breakthrough is not feeling better.
It is three o'clock losing its authority to report on God.
You have been reading your own exhaustion as a spiritual measurement, and it is not one. The hour has been telling you something about distance that it has no way of knowing, and you have been believing it because at three in the morning everything sounds true.
You are held in this hour exactly as in any other. The written word flattens the difference between night and day where God is concerned, entirely, on purpose. The Holy Spirit is as near at three as at ten, and the change since ten has happened in your body rather than in Him.
Nothing here says what the morning brings, and nothing here will guess. That door and that hour belong to God, and I will not pretend to know.
You have a nearness that the hour cannot alter. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee, and alike is doing the whole work: no adjustment, no diminishment, no distance. The Holy Spirit has been beside you since ten, including the stretch where you stopped being able to say so.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the standing to speak over your own night was given to you and no hour issues it or takes it back. Speak to the hour and to the thought, never over the door or the morning; those belong to God alone. What He does tonight is His to decide, and however He answers it you are His today.
- Three in the morning, you are the worst hour and you are not a darker place to God than noon. The Word of God says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, so this corridor is as lit to Him as any room I have ever been in.
- Thought that says He is further away at this hour, get out of this corridor in the name of Jesus. My body is heavier at three and my faith has not moved, and those two have been running together since half past two.
- God, You are in this corridor and You have been here since ten, including the part where I stopped talking. Your written Word says the night shineth as the day, and the Holy Spirit did not leave when my words did. I am seen here, and I am seen at three exactly as at noon.
Psalm 139:11-12
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