Only in the Dark

She wakes at twenty to three, the way she has for most of a year, and she does not fight it anymore. She puts on the robe and takes the quilt and goes out to the porch, and the boards are cold and the fog is lying down in the bottom of the hollow like something asleep.

And out there, in the dark, where nothing can look at her, she can say it.

It is one sentence. She has never said it in front of another human being. She said it once to the dog, who did not react, which is why she keeps the dog. The sentence is not scandalous. If you heard it you would not gasp. It is only this: I want to be somebody's first thought.

That is all. Not somebody's obligation, not the name at the top of a list of people who ought to be called. First thought. The person you tell a thing to before you have decided whether it is worth telling. She had that once, a long time back, and she has been careful and useful and dependable ever since, and at twenty to three she knows what she has not had in years the way you know your own hand.

Then the sky does what it does. The ridge goes from black to charcoal to a thin line of gray, and the fog starts moving, and the kitchen window comes on yellow behind her because the timer on the coffee maker does not care what she said. And by the time there is actual light on the boards, the sentence has gone strange on her.

By seven it sounds like something a much younger woman would say. By seven she can hear how it would land if she said it to her sister on the telephone, the little pause, the careful voice coming back. By seven she has a list on the back of the door and two people counting on her before noon, and the sentence has been folded up and put in the drawer where she keeps it, and she will not take it out again until twenty to three tomorrow.

Here is the thing she has never quite put together. She does not think the sentence is false. She has never once, in daylight, decided it was untrue. What she decides in daylight is something else entirely. She decides it is embarrassing.

And so she lives her whole life on the ration of one honest sentence a night, spoken to a dog and a fog bank, and takes it back before the coffee is done.

Maybe your sentence is different from hers. Maybe yours is about being seen, or being chosen out of a group, or having one person left who knew you before. But you know the hour it comes, and you know exactly what it costs you when the light comes up and you put it away.

The daylight is not the honest one

I want to name what happens at seven o'clock, because I think you have blamed the wrong thing for it.

You have assumed the daylight is more honest than the dark. That at three in the morning you are exaggerating, and at seven you are level headed, and the level headed one is the one telling the truth. That is not what is happening. Nothing about the sentence changed between three and seven. What arrived at seven was an audience. The jury woke up. The dark is not more emotional than the day; it is only emptier of people who might have an opinion, which is why it is the one place you can hear yourself.

So the sentence you can only say in the dark is not the unreliable one. It is very often the only unedited thing you say all day.

You are not exaggerating at three in the morning, and the sentence you say out there is not a symptom. I am not saying that to be nice about it. Isaiah 26:8 has the prophet saying the desire of the soul out loud and putting a name on where it is aimed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about desire and carries it out onto a cold porch at the exact hour a person is embarrassed to be awake.

Look at what he actually says, and notice that he does not apologize once.

Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O Lord, have we waited for thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee.Isaiah 26:8

The desire of our soul. He does not call it a weakness. He does not put it in a drawer. He is writing in a national night, in a chapter full of walls and dust and waiting, and he says the wanting out loud in the plainest words available and then aims it.

And read the next line of that chapter sometime, because it settles the whole three in the morning question. With my soul have I desired thee in the night, he says, and then he says he will seek Him early. In the night, and early. The prophet uses both hours and never suggests one of them is the honest one. He is the same man at both ends of the dark.

You have a night hour and a morning hour, and the same God is standing in both of them. Isaiah 26:9 puts the desiring in the night and the seeking at first light in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the One who holds a sentence steady across the seam where the light comes up.

The name under the sentence

Now I want to go one layer down, carefully, because this is where a page like this usually goes wrong.

Under her sentence about being somebody's first thought there is another sentence, older and larger. I want to say very clearly what I am not doing here. I am not telling her that the first sentence was the wrong thing to want. It is not wrong. It is a good and human thing to want to be somebody's first thought, and God made her for the kind of love that has a face and a telephone number, and nothing in this paragraph takes that away from her or hands her a lesson instead of a meal.

But when Isaiah names the desire of his soul, he does something she has not done. He aims it. The desire of our soul is to thy name. Not to a circumstance. Not to a fixed situation, not to a specific outcome, not to a repaired arrangement. To a name. To a Person, and to the remembrance of Him.

That is what naming a hunger actually is. Not shrinking it. Aiming it.

You are hungry for a Person, and that is what the sentence at three in the morning has been reaching for all along. Isaiah 26:8 says the desire of the soul is to His name, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a hunger a person has only ever said to a dog and shows them the face it was always pointed at.

And here is the mercy in it. If the hunger were only for a fixed circumstance, then it would have to wait on a circumstance, and circumstances are slow and other people are free. But the desire of the soul is to His name, and His name is available at twenty to three and at seven and at noon. He does not keep office hours. He is not asleep behind a door.

You were never made to be fed by the smaller thing alone, and you were never wrong to want it either. The written word puts the desire of the soul on a name, not on a lesson learned, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a person keep the honest sentence and get a Person as well.