The Name I Say at Three

She is awake before she knows she is awake, and the name is already there, and it is always three or near enough that she has stopped checking.

Nine years. It began the winter he was nineteen and it has not missed more than a handful of nights since, and she has learned to come down rather than lie there, because lying there is worse. So she comes down, and puts the kettle on out of habit and mostly does not drink it, and sits at the table in the one lamp with the window black.

For the first years she prayed hard at three. Fought, really. She would say things out loud with force in them, and sometimes she would walk the kitchen, and there was a period in the fourth year when she was doing this most nights with a violence that frightened her a little afterward.

She does not do that now. Now she sits, and says the name, and says please, and after a while she goes back up.

And here is the thing that has grown in her lately and that she has not said to a soul, and it is the reason this article exists.

She has begun to think the waking is a punishment.

Not a large theological conclusion. A quiet one, arrived at the way a tired woman arrives at things at three in the morning over nine years. That she is being woken because something in her failed him, and that the nightly waking is the form of the account being kept, and that when he is well she will be allowed to sleep.

Rosalind is fifty-eight and she has never in nine years said that out loud in a room with the light on.

If you are woken with a name, hear the question. Who told you that was a punishment?

God announces who is on the front line

The chapter is one where Zion has been saying that the Lord has forgotten her, and God answers at length, and then near the end He says this about the children.

For I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.Isaiah 49:25

I will contend with him that contendeth with thee. Read the pronoun. God is announcing that the contending is His work. There is somebody contending, and He is taking that on Himself, in the first person, as the one who does that job.

Rosalind has been contending. That is exactly the word for what those nights in the fourth year were, and she has been doing it at three in the morning for nine years as though the front line were her position and she had been posted to it alone.

She has been standing in a place God is describing as His.

You are not the one on that front line, and it is already His contending, and He announced it in the first person as work He takes on. I am not soothing a woman who is exhausted. It is written in Isaiah 49:25, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a declaration about contending into a kitchen at three in the morning.

What the waking probably is

And now let me say the other thing carefully, because it is the one she needs and it must not be overstated.

Nobody can tell you with certainty why a particular person wakes at three. Bodies do it. Grief does it. Nine years of a habit does it, and a habit is not less real for being a habit.

But I can tell you what it is not, and I can tell you it with confidence, because the character of God is not a matter of guesswork. It is not a punishment. There is no mechanism in Scripture by which God keeps an account against a mother by waking her nightly, and there is no verse anywhere that would support it, and the whole shape of Isaiah 49 is God answering a woman who thought she had been forgotten by insisting that He has not.

And if it is not a punishment, then the most likely reading of a nine year pattern of waking with one name is the ordinary one that nobody says out loud because it sounds too simple: she is being given the name.

You are not being punished, and it is already the opposite of that, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the word by which He does what you have been assuming He does. Scripture says can a woman forget her sucking child, yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee (Isaiah 49:15), and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman at a kitchen table who has decided she is being held to account.

Move from the front line to the place beside Him

And here is the change, and it is not a change in whether she prays.

She has been praying as a combatant. Alone, at night, on a line she believes she holds, against something she cannot see, with the outcome resting on how hard she fights. That is what wore the violence into the fourth year and it is what has hollowed her since.

The verse offers her a different position: standing beside somebody who has announced that the contending is His.

She still comes down. She still says the name. But the posture is not a woman holding a line. It is a woman agreeing with the one who has already gone out onto it.

You are standing beside the one contending rather than holding a line alone, and the position is already His and not yours to hold. It is written that He will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman off a front line she was never posted to.