The Whole Time It Was Happening

It is ten past one, and the landing light is still on because somebody left it on hours ago and nobody had the heart to go back for it.

The glass of water from bedtime has gone warm on the shelf. The duvet is half on the floor. Your child is sitting up against the headboard with both hands flat on the mattress, the way a person sits when they have decided not to lie down again.

Same dream. Third time this month.

You know the routine by now. It is not real. It was only a dream. Look, the room is fine. You have said all of it in the kind voice, and then, at half past one on a Tuesday, in the other voice, and none of it has ever worked, because the problem was never that your child thinks the dream was real.

The problem is that sleep is now the door the dream comes through.

So they sit up. They ask for water they do not drink. They ask you to leave the door wider. And then comes the question you cannot answer, asked in a small voice, looking at the duvet and not at you.

What if it comes back.

You stand there holding a warm glass. You could promise. It would settle the next four minutes and cost you everything the next time, because a child remembers a promise that failed.

So you do not promise. You sit down on the edge of the bed, which is the only honest thing left when the good lines are gone.

That is the room this is written for. Not a lesson about dreams. Ten past one, a small person who will not lie down, and a parent who has run out of true things to say.

There is one more true thing, and it is short enough to say at that hour.

The dream and the room are two different places

The question being answered all week is whether it was real. The question actually being asked is whether it is here, and only one of those is keeping a child sitting upright at one in the morning.

A dream is a place a small person goes and then comes back from. Grown-ups know that a place they left is not a place they are still standing in. A six year old is still learning it, and at night, with the lamp off, nobody is at their best at learning anything.

So do not go looking for the dream. Do not ask, at this hour, what it was about. Telling it at one in the morning is not getting it out. It is running it again with the lights off, and then there are two of you in it instead of one.

If they want to tell you, say the morning is a good time for it, at the table, with toast.

And you are not the one who has to make sense of it tonight. Psalm 3:5 says he lay down and slept and woke again, because the Lord was holding him up, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that steady in a bedroom at one in the morning, not how well the explaining goes.

What does help is the room. Not the dream, the room. Reach over and click the lamp on, and look at the actual room together for ten seconds. The chair with the jumper on it. The shelf. The door, open the width it is always open.

Nothing in that room moved while they were asleep.

I lay down and slept. I woke again, because the Lord was holding me up.Psalm 3:5

He lay down. He slept. He woke up alright, and the reason given is not that the night went easy on him. Somebody held him up the whole way through.

And you have a small person here who was held exactly like that. His word is where that comes from and not from anybody's good intentions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it into a room at this hour.

Nobody was in there on their own

Here is what a child is most afraid of after a bad dream, and it is almost never the thing in the dream.

It is that they were on their own in it. That it happened somewhere nobody could reach them, and that if it happens again they will be on their own again.

And that fear has an honest edge to it, which is that no parent can follow them in. A mother can sit on the edge of that bed all night and still not go where a child goes when their eyes close.

That is exactly the place where God is not limited the way we are.

The whole time it was happening, He was awake. Not watching from the hallway. Awake in there, with your child, for every second of it, before they woke up and called for you and long before you got to the door.

And you have not been failing at a job that was never yours to do. Scripture says the Lord is near to everyone who calls on Him, and the Spirit does the reaching into the places a parent cannot reach.

So do not promise the dream is gone for good. That promise gets tested, sometimes within the week, and when it fails a child quietly files the whole message under things that were said to settle me down.

Promise what is actually true and can be said again tomorrow. He was in there. He is in here. The dream ended and He did not.

And you were given this house and this hour by God on purpose. He promised never to leave, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact in this bedroom rather than a nice line in a book.

Say it flat and ordinary. It does not need to be beautiful.

And you have nothing left in the tank, and none of this was ever running on your tank. The written word says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit carries a tired, plain sentence further into a small person than a good speech ever goes.