Emergency Contact For Six People

The phone lies face up on the nightstand, screen toward the ceiling, and it has been that way for about four years.

Face up matters. Face down would mean he might not see it light the room. He worked that out some time in the second year and has not gone back on it since.

Six names. His mother, who is eighty. A neighbor with no family in the state. A friend from work who went through something in the spring and asked him quietly one afternoon, and he said yes without pausing, because what else does a man say. His sister. Her boy. And one he took on so long ago that he cannot now remember agreeing to it.

He is glad to be that for all six of them. That is honest and it is worth saying, because half the writing about this assumes a man is secretly bitter and he is not.

But he has not slept a whole night since some time before all this started. And he noticed something at a wedding in June: three hours in, at a table, with the phone in his jacket on the back of a chair, he could not settle, and it was not the noise, and it was not the people. He was listening. He is always listening.

You know that listening. Maybe you are not on anybody's form. But somewhere you have made yourself permanently available, and the availability has stopped being a decision and become a state.

Name the cost, and name it before anything else

Nobody on those six forms has counted it, so let us.

It has cost him four years of unbroken sleep, which is a physical debt and not a mood.

It cost him the wedding in June, and about a hundred other rooms, in the specific sense that he has been in them and not in them at the same time.

And it has cost him the ability to be off duty at all. That is the expensive one and it is not fixed by a quiet week: after four years of listening, the listening happens whether the phone is there or not, and he tested that once by leaving it in the car and it was worse.

You have been on call for four years, and God has never once put you on that list. Psalm 121:4 says He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and it is His Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it in a dark bedroom with a screen facing the ceiling. Somebody is awake tonight, and the whole point of that verse is that it does not have to be him.

He makes me lie down, and the making is the mercy

There is one line built for a man who cannot get himself to stop listening.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.Psalm 23:2

The verb is the thing. He makes me. Not He invites me, not He recommends that I. There is a gentle compulsion in the sentence, and any shepherd will tell you why it is there: a sheep that will not lie down is not being stubborn, it is being vigilant, and a vigilant animal cannot rest until something else takes over the watching.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is exactly his mechanism, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land in a body rather than remain a nice pastoral image.

You are made to lie down by somebody who has taken over the watching, and the taking over is not conditional on you letting go first. That is not a soft reading of a famous psalm. The written word puts the compulsion on His side and the lying down on yours, and the Spirit is the one who does the watching while a tired man finally stops.

And I want to be plain, because otherwise this becomes a seventh form to fill in. Rest here is not a discipline you are behind on. I am not asking you to take yourself off anybody's paperwork, I am not prescribing what your evening should look like, and not one of those six people has been let down by a man who is tired.

Being off duty for an hour is not abandoning anybody

The fear here is precise and it is not vanity.

It is that the one hour he is not listening will be the hour. That his mother goes down at eighty and the phone lights the room and nobody sees it, and it will be traceable to a decision he made about his own comfort.

You are not the only one awake in that county, and putting the phone face down for one hour is not a decision about your mother. Psalm 121:3 says He will not suffer your foot to be moved and He who keeps you does not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes keeps into a live verb over six people rather than a general assurance.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the not sleeping has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you check on anybody else. That is not the listening failing. That is the shepherding, arriving through people with hands and telephone numbers, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.