She Has Not Told Anyone About Tuesday

It was about three in the morning and Danielle woke up all at once, which she never does.

That is the whole of what this article is going to describe, and I want to say why before we go any further. Whatever happened in your room, I am not going to describe it, or name it, or tell you what it was. I was not there. Nobody who writes anything on the internet was there. And the single most common way people in your situation get hurt is by a stranger who was not in the room deciding, confidently, what was in it.

So: she woke up. She was frightened in a way she has no vocabulary for. It lasted some number of minutes she could not tell you accurately. She had the light on until it got light.

That was in April. It is now August.

Here is what has happened since, and this is the part I actually want to talk about.

She has not told a single person.

She has thought about telling three. Her sister, who would be kind and would then worry about her out loud to other people. A woman at church, who Danielle suspects would want it to be a spiritual event and would be quite excited about it. And her doctor, who she thinks would write something down.

So she has said nothing, for four months, and the not-saying has done more to her than the night did. She has stopped sleeping with the door shut. She has a routine now, going round the apartment, that she is aware is a routine. She turned down a weekend away in June for a reason she gave that was not the reason.

Here is the day it caught.

Her friend, sitting in her kitchen, said, "You look shattered."

And Danielle said, "I'm not sleeping great."

And her friend said, "Since when?"

And Danielle said, "April," and then heard the month come out of her own mouth with a date attached to it, and knew that she had just told somebody something without meaning to, and changed the subject.

You know that. Something happened, or something that felt like something happened, and you have not said it out loud, and the silence has become a bigger part of your life than the night was.

Who holds the room together

Let me be extremely plain about what I am not doing here, because this is the article where being sloppy would do real damage.

I am not going to tell you what happened. I am not going to name anything, and I am not going to describe anything, and I am not going to teach you a method, a prayer to say over the room, a thing to do with your hands, or a procedure of any kind. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it. Anybody who hands you a technique for a night they were not present at is not helping you.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it with a heightened sense of what might be out there, then I have failed and you should close the tab.

What I am going to do is settle one thing about the room, and it is not a small thing.

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.Colossians 1:16-17

Read the last four words. By him all things consist. The word means hold together, cohere, stay in one piece.

Paul lists the visible and the invisible in that verse, and he does it in the flattest possible way, the way you would list inventory. He is not building suspense. He is doing the opposite: he is putting everything, seen and unseen, on one side of a line, and Christ on the other, and the entire point of the sentence is that the second side is holding the first side together.

You are in a room that is held together by Christ, seen and unseen, and that was true at three in the morning in April. Colossians 1:17 puts everything created on one side and Him on the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into an apartment where somebody has not slept properly in four months.

And notice what Paul does not do. He does not describe anything. He does not name a single one of the invisible things individually or tell the Colossians how to deal with them. He lists a category, once, in passing, and then spends the rest of the letter on Christ.

You have never needed to know what was in the room in order for the room to have a Lord, and Scripture models exactly that reticence. It is written that all things consist in Him, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a settled lordship more useful than an explanation.

The silence is doing more than the night did

Now here is what I actually want to reach, because I think it is where the weight is.

Four months of not telling anybody has cost Danielle more than one night did. That is almost always true and almost nobody says it.

And the reason for the silence is not shame about the night. It is a very accurate prediction about how three different people would respond. She is not wrong about any of them. The sister would worry loudly. The church woman would want it to be a spiritual event. The doctor would write something down.

Here is the thing about that third one, though, and I am going to say it plainly because it matters more than the rest of this article.

Tell the doctor.

Not instead of God. Not because it is only physical. Because a person waking suddenly, frightened, unable to move or speak, is describing something that has ordinary medical explanations that are common, well understood, and treatable, and because four months of bad sleep is itself a medical matter, and because a doctor writing something down is not a judgment on you, it is a doctor doing their job.

You are not being disloyal to God by seeing a doctor, and there is no verse anywhere that puts those two in competition. Colossians 4:14 has Paul calling Luke the beloved physician as a plain compliment, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps the ordinary care of a body from being read as a lack of faith.

And say the rest of it here too, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the four months have taken you somewhere darker than tired, tell somebody tonight. Your sister, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you what happened in April. That is me refusing to leave you in that apartment on your own.