The Sleep He Keeps Borrowing Against

Half four, most days, for about nine years.

It is not that he cannot sleep. He sleeps well, when he does it. It is that the day does not fit into the day, and the only place he has ever found to take the extra from is the beginning of it.

So the alarm goes at half four, and everything gets done, and it works.

He would tell you he is just an early riser. He has said that a great many times and half of the people who know him would say it about him without being asked.

Here is what he has never said, because it makes it sound worse than it feels.

He is not an early riser. He is a man who has been taking money out of one account for nine years to pay into all the others, and the account it comes out of is his own body, and the balance is not visible from outside.

He knows this in the way you know a thing at four in the afternoon when the wall arrives.

The wall arrives most days now. It did not used to. It comes about half three, and he goes through it, and by six he is fine again, and nobody has ever seen it because it happens in a van or on a slipway with nobody looking.

He has started to think of tiredness as something he is rather than something he is doing.

If you have been borrowing against yourself, come and sit on this jetty a minute. Nobody is going to tell you what time to go to bed.

The psalm treats sleep as a thing given rather than a thing earned

There is a line in a psalm about work that is much sharper than it looks.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

The first half is a plain description of what you have been doing. Rising early, sitting up late. And the word attached to it is vain, which does not mean pointless in the sense that nothing gets done. Everything gets done. It means the effort does not produce what the person is trying to buy with it. Psalm 127:2 finishes the sentence by saying so he giveth his beloved sleep, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that word beloved sitting inside a verse about overwork, which is where the whole weight of it lands.

And then the second half puts sleep on a completely different footing.

He gives it. It is not a thing you earn by finishing, and it is not a reward for a day that fitted. It is described as something handed to somebody He is fond of.

You are being given something rather than budgeting for it, and the psalm puts sleep on the giving side. Psalm 127:2 makes it a gift to the beloved rather than a wage, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a line like that land in a man who has been running an account for nine years, which means what you have been taking out was never the currency.

Tiredness is a debt, not a personality

Now the thing you said to yourself and did not like, which is right and worth holding on to.

You have started to think of tiredness as something you are, and it is a debt rather than an identity. Psalm 127:2 calls the rising early and sitting up late vain and then hands sleep to His beloved in the same breath, and it is the same Spirit who settles a person rather than a person managing it, which means what you have been calling your character is an account that can be paid down.

That is what happens when a debt runs long enough. It stops looking like a balance and starts looking like a characteristic, and then it becomes unquestionable, because nobody argues with a characteristic.

But a wall that arrives at half three did not use to arrive, and you know when it started, and things that start are not characteristics.

You are not a tired man by nature, and the state you are in is a balance rather than a description. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a person inside a body with actual limits in it, which means what you have been calling your temperament is a thing God sees as a body doing what bodies do.

And here is what this article will not do.

It will not give you a bedtime. It will not tell you to get up later, which you cannot do, or to work less, which you also cannot do, or to change anything about the shape of a life that has real people leaning on it.

There is no view here about anybody's health, nothing about medicine, which stays between you and the people who look after you, and no suggestion that if you had slept better you would be a different man.

You have permission to take one small thing back tonight, and it is not indulgence. 1 Corinthians 6:19 calls the body the temple of the Holy Spirit which you have of God, and it is that Spirit who is living in the man who gets up at half four, which means an hour of sleep is not a luxury taken out of somebody else's account.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding all nine years of it, including every half three.