Awake, and a Little Embarrassed

She was crying when it woke her, and she had already stopped by the time her father got to the door.

That is the part nobody writes about. There is the waking, and the crying, and then a third thing: the two seconds after the lamp goes on when a seven year old works out that she has been heard.

He came in the way anybody comes in at that hour, half asleep, hand out for the switch. The room went yellow. She was sitting up with the duvet gathered around her middle and her face turned toward the wall, and her ears were red, and she said, in the voice of a person who has decided to be finished with the entire matter, "I am fine. You can go back to bed."

He did not go back to bed.

He also did not say the thing he nearly said, which was what was it about. Every parent nearly says it. It comes from love and it is almost always the wrong sentence, because it asks a small person to go back in there, walk around, and describe the furniture, at two in the morning, out loud.

So he sat down on the floor with his back against the bed instead, which put his head lower than hers, and he yawned an enormous and completely unhelpful yawn.

"I am not going back to bed. I am very comfortable here."

"I did not even cry that much."

"All right."

"I am not a baby."

"I know exactly what you are. Do you want the lamp on or off?"

She thought about that for a long time.

"On for a bit."

"Then it stays on for a bit."

He did not ask her one single question. He looked around the room once, slowly, the way a person looks at a room they like, and he said, "Everything is exactly where we left it." She checked it herself. It was still true.

That is the two minutes this was written for. Not a lesson about being brave. One seven year old with hot ears, one father on the carpet, and one lamp that got to stay on for a bit.

She stopped crying before you got there

Let me name the thing you walked into, because it will save you a great deal of guessing at two in the morning. Your child is not still frightened. Your child is embarrassed, and those two need completely different handling.

Fright wants company. Embarrassment wants the subject changed. That is why the small person who called out for you three minutes ago is now telling you to go away, and it is not a rejection and it is not rudeness. It is a seven year old trying to get her dignity back on before anybody sees her without it.

You are not required to argue her out of that, and it is not a fault in her. Psalm 56:8 says God keeps count of every toss and turn and collects the tears in His bottle, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a verse like that land inside a child at two in the morning rather than a parent's cleverness.

You keep count of every time I turn over in the night. You put my tears in Your bottle. They are all written down in Your book.Psalm 56:8

Sit in that for a second. Not one of those tears was wasted, not one of them was silly, and God did not need to be told about them afterwards. He was collecting them while they were still falling.

So we do not tell a child that crying was a lapse. We do not praise them for being brave either, because that quietly tells them the crying was the failure and the not crying would have been the win. Neither sentence is true and children can hear both of them coming.

You have a much simpler job than the one being attempted at that hour. Scripture says the Lord is near to the broken hearted, and the Holy Spirit had already closed that distance long before anybody found the light switch.

The dream is over and the room never went anywhere

Here is the thing worth saying out loud, and it is short, which is right for two in the morning.

A dream is real to feel and it is not real now. Those are two different statements and a small child cannot hold them apart on their own yet. So we do not debate whether it was real, because it was real to feel, and telling a child otherwise makes them a liar in their own bed. We simply separate it from the room.

The room is the evidence. The room is still here, in the exact arrangement it was in at seven o'clock, and it can be looked at. That is why the lamp matters. Not to chase anything off. To let a small person confirm with her own eyes that the place she is actually lying in has not been rearranged by anything at all.

And then there is the sentence that does the real work, and it is not about the room.

You were not late. His word says the One who watches over you does not slumber and does not sleep, and the Holy Spirit was in that room, awake, for every second of it, while every human being in the house was unconscious.

That is the load-bearing one. A child's private fear after a bad dream is almost never the dream. It is the suspicion that they were somewhere by themselves and nobody could get to them. The answer to that is not that it was only a dream. The answer is that the room had somebody in it the whole time it was happening.

You have a lamp, a room and a hand, and that happens to be the entire toolkit. It is written that God is a refuge and a strength and a very present help in trouble, and the Spirit makes an ordinary lit bedroom the proof of it in about forty seconds.