It Shows Up in My Body

She is sitting on the edge of the bed at three in the morning with the lamp on and a glass of water she does not want, and the ache is there again, under the breastbone, exactly where it always is.

It is not a pain. She has tried to find words for it more than once and pain is the wrong word, which is part of what makes it hard to carry. It sits high in the chest and it goes up into the throat, and it feels like the moment just before you say something important, held for hours. Like a held breath that will not go out. Like leaning toward something across a distance you cannot cross by leaning.

So she has done what she does, which is run the list, because there has to be a reason and she is a reasonable woman.

It was the conversation on Thursday. She goes over the conversation on Thursday. It does not fit; the ache was there on Wednesday. It is tiredness. She is tired, certainly, but tiredness puts you to sleep and this is doing the opposite. It is something she ate, it is the room being too warm, it is the week she has had, it is the thing she said in the car that she should not have said. She works down the list the way you work down a list, and by ten past three she has been through the whole thing twice and not one item on it fits the shape of what she is actually feeling.

Which leaves the item at the bottom of the list, the one she never says in daylight and cannot get away from at three in the morning: there is something wrong with me.

That is the real reason she is sitting up with the lamp on. Not the ache. The conclusion about the ache. Other people sleep. Other people are not sitting on the edge of a bed at three with a full glass of water they did not want, leaning toward something with no name, feeling like a person waiting for somebody who is not coming. She has begun to think of herself as someone with a faulty part. Something in her wants too much, or wants at the wrong hour, or wants what is not on offer, and everybody else got issued the version that settles.

I know those hours, by the way. Three to six is the watch I keep, and I can tell you that far more people are awake in them than the ones who are awake ever imagine.

So she sits there, and the house is quiet, and the lamp makes its small circle, and the ache stays exactly where it is, high up, patient, aimed at something she cannot name.

Maybe you are reading this at your own three o'clock. Maybe yours is not the chest, maybe it is the throat or the arms or that restlessness that gets you up and walks you to a window for no reason. And maybe you have quietly concluded the same thing she has.

The psalms put it in the body too

Here is the first thing, and if you have never seen it in the text it will surprise you, because we are usually taught to keep longing tidy and spiritual and above the collarbone.

My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto thy judgments at all times.Psalm 119:20

Breaketh. That is not a delicate word. The writer of that psalm is describing a longing for God that comes with a physical verb attached, the way you would describe something giving way under load. And he is not confessing it as a fault. He is not asking to be delivered from it. He puts it in a psalm, in the middle of a long careful poem about loving what God has said, as a plain statement of how it is with him at all times.

You are not the first person to feel a longing for God arrive in the body, and Scripture put it in writing long before it woke you tonight. Psalm 119:20 says the soul breaks for longing and never once calls it a defect, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line from an old poem and sets it down on the edge of a bed at three in the morning, where somebody had already reached the bottom of her list.

And it is not one verse. David does the same thing, and he is even more specific about where it lands.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

My flesh longeth for thee. He says the longing is in his flesh. Not only in his thoughts about God, not only in his intentions on a Sunday. In the body, early, in a dry place, with a physical word for it, and he says it out loud to God rather than hiding it as evidence of something wrong with him.

You were made in one piece, and a hunger for God that arrives in the chest at three in the morning is not a malfunction of the part that should have stayed quiet. It is written in Psalm 63:1 that the flesh itself longs for Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that into a room with a lamp on, so a woman running a checklist can put the checklist down.

It gets an address, not an ending

Now the part I have to say carefully, because you have been offered the wrong ending for this before and it did not work.

I am not going to tell you how to make the ache stop. I could not, and I would not, because that is not what it is for. This hunger is not a problem with a fix at the end of it. What it has been missing is not a cure. It is an address.

Think about what she is actually doing on the edge of that bed. She is leaning. The whole ache is a lean, a reaching across a distance toward something with no name on it, and because it has no name she has turned the reaching back on herself and made it a symptom. Give it the name and nothing about the sensation changes and everything about the meaning does. It is not a fault reaching nowhere. It is a hunger for a Person, and He is not out of reach, and He is not asleep at three.

You are longing for Someone rather than suffering from something, and the ache has an address tonight even though it does not have an ending. Psalm 63:1 has David saying his flesh longs for God in a dry land, and the Spirit is the One who takes an old man's honest sentence and hands it to somebody at three in the morning as her own words.

And I want to be plain about what I am not promising. I am not telling you the ache will be gone by morning. It may not be. The psalmists carried theirs for decades and wrote some of the best lines in Scripture out of the middle of it, and nowhere does the text treat that as a failure on their part. A hunger for God is aimed rather than cured, and if you go on being hungry for Him after tonight, you have not done this wrong.

You have been given the aim tonight, and being fed and still hungry is the ordinary condition of somebody who has tasted that the Lord is good. It is written that the soul breaks for the longing it has at all times, and His Spirit is the One who makes an all times honest and not a diagnosis.