Awake or Asleep, We Live With Him

He used to be able to do it. That is the part that catches him.

Twenty years ago he would come in at ten, eat, and then sit in the front room with the lamp on and read and pray for the better part of an hour, and it was not a discipline, it was just the shape of the evening. He did it after long days. He did it after the bad year with the barn.

Now he is sixty seven and he falls asleep in the chair at about twenty past eight, mid sentence, most nights, and wakes up at eleven with the light on and his glasses somewhere on the floor.

The tiredness is not a mystery. He had a heart thing four years ago and there is a tablet that does what the tablet does, and the doctor said the tiredness was expected and he should not fight it.

The problem is not medical. The problem is that he was raised on watch and pray, and he took that literally, and the arrangement in his head has always been that a man stays spiritually awake by effort, the way you stay awake on a long drive. And now he cannot.

He has begun to be frightened of the evenings. That is the honest sentence and it took him about a year to be able to put it that plainly. Not frightened of dying, which he has thought about a good deal and has largely made his peace with. Frightened of falling asleep at twenty past eight with nothing said, night after night, and what that must be adding up to.

Sit down in the chair. There is a verse that covers exactly this and it is in the same letter everybody quotes at funerals.

The sentence that covers the sleeping

Here it is, and it comes four verses after a passage about watchfulness, which is not an accident.

For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him.1 Thessalonians 5:9

Whether we are awake or asleep. Paul has just spent a paragraph on staying alert, and he knows exactly what an anxious person will do with it, so he closes the section by removing the outcome from the reader's alertness entirely.

And notice what he grounds it in. Who died for us. The reason the awake and the asleep both live with Him is not that they managed something. It is what was done for them.

You are covered on both sides of that word. 1 Thessalonians 5:9 says awake or asleep we live with Him, and the Spirit inspired that clause immediately after the watchfulness passage because He knew what men like you would do with the first half on its own.

What watching actually meant

Now the instruction itself, because the version being obeyed in that front room was never the one given.

The watchfulness language in the New Testament is not about staying conscious. It is about orientation. It means living as somebody who expects Him rather than as somebody who has settled down as though nothing is coming, and the opposite of it in those passages is not sleepiness, it is being drunk, careless, and absorbed in things that will not last.

A man who falls asleep at twenty past eight with his glasses on the floor is not the person those passages are warning about. You are not the man those verses are warning, and 1 Thessalonians 5 is warning people who had let the whole expectation go slack rather than people whose bodies have got tired, and the Spirit did not inspire that paragraph to be turned on a man who has kept the lamp on for forty years.

Your evenings are not a failure of vigilance. Nothing written anywhere makes staying conscious the requirement, and the Spirit is not measuring a man's standing by how late he can keep the lamp on.

And there is something almost funny about how badly the metaphor has been applied to you. The image is a watchman on a wall, and a watchman is posted, which means somebody else assigned him and somebody else relieves him. Nobody in Scripture is asked to hold a post that nobody relieves him from until he dies of it.

And think about who the warning was written to. Those passages are addressed to people in danger of settling down as though nothing were coming: people building bigger barns, people saying my master delays, people who had let the whole expectation go slack. Read the list and see whether a man who has kept the lamp on for forty years and now cannot is anywhere on it. He is not. The warning never had him in view, and the Spirit did not inspire it to be turned around on the very people it was meant to comfort.

What the evenings can be instead

Here is the practical part, and it is not a schedule.

Move it earlier. That is most of it. If the useful hour is now at four in the afternoon on the step with a cup of something, then that is where it is, and nothing anywhere assigns a time of day.

And let the falling asleep be what it is. There is an old and very good practice of saying one sentence as you go, deliberately, rather than trying to hold an hour you no longer have. Say it at twenty past eight when you feel it coming. Then let go.

You are held while you are asleep. That is written into 1 Thessalonians 5:9 as plainly as language can put it, and the Spirit does not withdraw from a chair when the man in it stops being conscious.

That is not permission to stop caring, and you were never in danger of that. It is permission for a sixty seven year old body to be a sixty seven year old body without it counting against him.

There is one more thing that belongs to a man your age and it is rarely said. Forty years of evenings are not gone. They are in you. What a person does with an hour a night for four decades does not evaporate when the hour stops being available, and the man who falls asleep at twenty past eight is falling asleep as somebody those forty years made, which is a different thing from a man who never started.