The Bed Is Too Big Now

You still make one side of it.

You pull that side up in the morning, and smooth it, and put the pillow straight, and you have not slept on it or near it since. It takes four seconds and you have never once decided to do it.

And you still lie on your side. The left one, or the right one, whichever it was, right at the edge, with the whole width of the bed behind you.

The days are survivable. That surprises people. You have found that you can do a day: there are things in a day, people arrive in it, the phone goes, and it moves along and takes you with it.

It is the nights.

It starts at about nine, when the day runs out of things and there is nothing left between you and going up. And then there is the room, and the size of it, and the silence that is a different silence from any other silence in the house.

And then the small things. The lamp on that side that nobody switches on. The particular sound of one person breathing in a room built for two.

I want to say what I am not going to do before I do anything at all.

I am not going to tell you that it gets easier.

You have been told that. Probably by somebody who meant it kindly and who was standing in your kitchen at the time, and it did two things at once: it made the present hour into a stage to be passed through, and it quietly asked you to be further along than you are.

And I am not going to explain it to you. I am not going to tell you what God is doing with this, or why, because I do not know, and the people who have told you confidently did not know either.

And I am not going to hurry you.

What I have is one thing for the nights, and a verse about somebody who found something in the dark that they were not looking for.

When I remember thee upon my bed

There is a line in the sixty third psalm about a bed and the night watches, and where it happens is the point.

When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. (Psalm 63:6, King James Version)

When I remember thee upon my bed.

Notice the place. Upon my bed, in the night watches, which is the small hours, the long stretch of them.

That psalm was written by a man in a wilderness, in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, and it is not a comfortable psalm. He is not writing from a settled house. And what he reports is that the remembering happens in bed, at night, in the watches, which is exactly the hour you have been dreading since nine o'clock.

He does not say the night stopped being long. He does not say the wilderness ended. He says that in that place, at that hour, there was a remembering.

And here is the part I want you to have.

The night watches are not empty hours to be endured until something better. They are, in this psalm, the hours where a particular kind of attention happens that does not happen in daylight. The daytime has things in it. The night has nothing in it, and that is precisely why something can be noticed there.

You have been treating those hours as the worst part. This verse treats them as a place where a person is met.

Not fixed. Not explained. Met.

You are met in the night watches rather than left in them, and that hour has never once been an empty stretch to be got through alone. Psalm 63:6 puts the remembering upon the bed in the small hours, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a room that was built for two.

The empty side is not the measure

Here is the practical half, and it is about the side of the bed.

That side has become a measurement.

Every night it reports the same number to you. It is the first thing your eye goes to when you come up and the last thing you are aware of before the lamp goes off, and what it says is: this is how much is missing, and it is exactly this much, and it has not changed since yesterday.

And you have let it be the truest thing in the room. It is the one object in that house that never softens its account.

But it is not measuring what you think.

It is measuring an absence and it is accurate about that. What it cannot see is anything that is present. It has no way of reporting company. It cannot register the fact that you are being remembered upon that bed, in those watches, by somebody who has not gone anywhere.

So the side of the bed is telling you a true thing incompletely, and you have been reading it as the whole account of the room.

You are not unattended in there. That is not the same as saying you are not alone, and I am not going to blur those two, because you are alone in a real way and the person who should be there is not there and no sentence of mine changes that.

But unattended is a different word, and it is not true of that room, and it has never been true of it for one night.

You are not unattended in that room, and the empty side has never once been able to report anything that is present. The written word puts the remembering right there upon the bed in the night watches, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you at the edge of a bed built for two.

Put one thing of yours on that side

So here is the one thing, and it is small and it is physical and it is not a step in a process.

Put one thing on the empty side of the bed that is yours.

Yours. That is the whole of it.

A book you are reading. A folded blanket you like. A cushion. The notebook. A cardigan. Something that belongs to you now, not something of theirs, and not a photograph, and not anything that turns that side into a shrine or a memorial.

Just an ordinary object of your own, placed there, tonight.

And let me say what this is not, because it matters.

It is not moving on. It is not a stage. It is not you making a statement about being ready, and it does not require you to feel anything at all when you do it.

And it is not filling the space, because the space is not fillable and I would not insult you by suggesting a cardigan does that.

It is this: that side of the bed has been an instrument that reports on absence, and you are putting one thing on it that is present. That is all. You are placing one true object next to a true absence, so that the side of the bed stops being the only witness in the room.

And you may take it off tomorrow and put it back the next day, and there is no right way to do this and nothing to keep up.

And if the making of that side in the morning is a thing you want to keep doing, keep doing it. Nobody is asking you to stop. I would not touch that.

You are able to set one thing of your own beside a true absence, and that has never once been asked to fill it. Psalm 63:6 says when I remember thee upon my bed, in the night watches, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody putting a book down on an empty side.