The Bread Of Sorrows

She has started three times this year and the third one lasted nine days, which is her record.

The system was reasonable. It is not that she picked something extreme. Twenty minutes in the morning, which she has read is the minimum a serious person does, and she moved her alarm to make room for it, and she moved it earlier again in week two when the twenty minutes kept getting eaten.

And on day ten she slept through, and on day eleven she did not try.

That is three times this year. The pattern is identical each time: two weeks of getting up earlier, an increasing quantity of tiredness that she does not connect to anything, and then a morning where her body simply does not do it, and then a quiet two weeks of not mentioning it to anybody.

She is not lazy. She works, she has two children under seven, one of whom does not sleep through, and she is doing the running about for her father since the spring.

And what has settled on her, after the third one, is the thing that is worst about all of this. It is not that she failed at a practice. It is that she now has evidence, three times over, that she is not the sort of person who can.

If you have got a record of nine days, come and sit down. Nothing here is starting on Monday.

The psalm is describing her, and it is not approving

Here is a verse that gets read as a mild encouragement to trust God, and it is considerably sharper than that.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Vain for you to rise up early. Vain means empty, pointless, achieving nothing.

He is not talking about laziness. Everybody in that psalm is working extremely hard. He is describing a specific kind of person: the one who gets up before they should and stays up after they should and eats what he calls the bread of sorrows, which is a devastating phrase for food eaten anxiously by somebody who is trying to get ahead of a life that is beating them.

And what the psalm says about that arrangement is not that it is admirable and needs a bit more grace to sustain. It says it is empty. It achieves nothing. It is a way of working that does not produce what the person is working for.

Now put her three attempts beside that. Each one was an attempt to solve a spiritual problem by rising up earlier. Three times. And the psalm addresses that exact move by name and calls it vain, in a sentence that is about eight hundred words earlier in the Bible than most of the advice she has been given.

You are not looking at a failure of discipline, and it was already named as empty in the psalm itself. Psalm 127:2 is where that sits, in a line about rising early that calls the whole strategy pointless, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to write that down for tired people is the one who takes a verdict off a woman at a kitchen table.

The second half of the verse is the part that will be hard

Now read the end of it, because it is the answer and it is going to be more difficult to accept than the diagnosis.

For so he giveth his beloved sleep.

That is the alternative offered. Not a better system. Not the same practice at a more realistic hour. Sleep, given, to somebody described as beloved.

And here is why that will be hard for her. She has been trying to produce evidence that she is serious about God, and what she is being offered instead is the assertion that she is already His beloved and should go to bed.

There is nothing to do with that. It cannot be attempted, it cannot be got better at, and it produces nothing she could show anybody, including herself.

Which is exactly why it will work and the twenty minutes did not.

You are already His beloved, and it is already what you are called in that verse, and it does not wait on any practice. He promised it, in that same sentence where the sleep is described as given rather than earned (Psalm 127:2), and His Spirit does not require a woman with two small children to get up before she has slept.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it, and for a woman in your position it is not a footnote.

Some people must not go without food, and somebody running on this little should be extremely careful. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And I want to say it directly. Nothing on this site is going to ask you to take one more thing off your body. You have two children under seven, one who does not sleep, and a father who needs you. You are already giving away more than most people give in a decade.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body has left. Scripture settled that where God accepts according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's remaining capacity.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.