The Last One Awake

Every house has a last sound. In this one it is the dishwasher. It runs all the way through the story and all the way through the goodnight, and then it makes one small tick and stops, and after that there is nothing at all.

Ada is six. She is fine at bath time. She is fine for the story, and fine for the second story, and fine when the lamp clicks and the room goes from yellow to blue. She says goodnight in a perfectly ordinary voice.

It is the quiet that gets her.

Somewhere after the dishwasher, the footsteps downstairs stop moving about. A door closes. The landing light goes off, the gold strip under Ada's door turns gray, and the whole house settles down onto itself the way houses do at the end of a day.

Ada lies there with the one thought a six year old can hold at that hour, which is not really a thought yet, only a very large feeling with no words on it. They have all gone. They are all asleep. I am the only one left.

So she calls out. Not loudly. Just, "Mum."

Her mother comes back up, because that is what a person does. She has been up twice already. It is twenty past nine, there is a lunch to make and a load of washing sitting wet in the machine, and she sits down on the edge of the bed anyway, which is the only honest thing to do when the good lines have run out. Then she says the true thing she has said every night this week.

"I am right here. I am only just down the hall."

And it does not touch it. It has not touched it once, any night, all week. Because down the hall is not in here, and asleep is not awake, and the question Ada is asking has nothing to do with distance.

That room is what this is written for. If the doorway at twenty past nine is yours, the rest of this belongs to you, and it is worth having in your mouth before the landing light goes off tomorrow night.

Being the last one awake is not the same as being the only one awake.

What the quiet is actually saying

Notice where it starts. Not at the dark. At the quiet.

The dark arrived twenty minutes earlier and nothing happened. It is when the last door closes that the whole thing turns over, and that tells us what this fear is made of. It is not a fear of the dark. It is a fear of the room being empty, and a house full of sleeping people sounds exactly like an empty house to somebody who is six.

So a child lying in that bed is not asking for a brighter room. They are asking whether anybody at all is still in it. That is a different question, and it happens to have a much better answer.

You are handing over company tonight, not courage. Genesis 28:16 says the Lord was in that place and Jacob did not know it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a small bedroom at twenty past nine.

Jacob was out in the open with a stone under his head and nobody within miles. He went to sleep certain he was the only one there. And when he woke up, the first thing out of his mouth was the sentence this whole message rests on.

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.Genesis 28:16

Read it slowly, because everything is in where the two halves sit. Jacob's knowing did not put Him there, and Jacob's not knowing did not keep Him out. The place was occupied the entire night. The only thing that changed by morning was that the man on the ground found out.

You have not been left on duty by yourself in this house. Scripture says the One who keeps you does not slumber and does not sleep, and the Holy Spirit holds that watch whether or not there is anything left in you at the end of the day.

Occupied is not the same as bright

This is why nothing on this site ever asks a child to be brave.

Bravery hands the whole night to a small person who is already tired, and then quietly makes the night their job. It is not their job, and it never was. A room with somebody in it does not need anybody in the bed to be strong enough.

So the sentence is never "there is nothing in here". It is "there is somebody in here". One of those argues with a child about what they feel. The other tells them who else is present, and lets the feeling do as it likes.

You were given this room, and the One who keeps it never goes off duty. The written word says He watches over your going out and your coming in, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing at that door tonight while the rest of the house sleeps.

Notice what this costs, because at twenty past nine that matters. It costs nothing that is not already in your hands. The sentence is true said beautifully or said flatly by somebody with a wet load of washing on their mind. The room is occupied because God is in it, and not because of how well anyone announced it.

You have a child who is not on their own in there, and the proof of it is not the light. Genesis 28 says the Lord was in that place before Jacob ever opened his eyes, and the Holy Spirit does not wait for a lamp to be switched on.

There is no technique here to get right, and no tone of voice that unlocks it. That is the mercy of it, because most parents arrive at this hour with nothing left to perform with.

You are not the occupancy of that room, and you never were. Scripture says the darkness is not dark to Him and the night shines like the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a tired, flat sentence and lands it in a small person.