I Get Dressed In The Dark

You get up in the dark and you leave.

Phone off the nightstand, clothes off the chair, out of the room before the light goes on, because there is nothing in there that requires looking at and the day is already moving.

At night you come back in with your eyes half shut, and you get into the bed, and that is the whole of your relationship with the room you spend a third of your life in.

Now here is what I want to point out, and it is not a criticism.

That is the only room in the house you have decided to be unconscious in. Every other room, you at least look around. The bedroom you have arranged, without ever deciding to, so that you never have to see it.

And when I ask people about this, the answer is almost always the same. It comes out as a shrug. Nobody sees it. It is the room where nothing happens. It is not worth doing anything about, because there is no audience for it.

Which is exactly the point, and it is also exactly backwards.

The room with no audience is the only room in your house that is purely yours. Every other space is at least partly for other people. That one is not.

So tonight we are going to put the light on and stay in there for ten minutes with your eyes open.

I will both lay me down in peace

There is a line in the Psalms about going to bed, and the whole thing turns on one word.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8, King James Version)

Dwell in safety. Not sleep in safety. Dwell.

You are somebody God is described as making to dwell rather than merely to sleep, and a room entered in the dark has never once been the limit of what He set up in it. Psalm 4:8 puts dwelling and safety in the same breath as lying down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman in a hallway that the word covers more than the hours she is unconscious.

Dwelling is a slower word than sleeping. It means living in a place. It carries settledness, presence, being at home in somewhere rather than passing through it.

And the psalm attaches it to the very moment a person lies down at night, which means the bed is being named as a place of dwelling and not merely a place of shutdown.

Now look at what makes it safe. Thou, LORD, only. Not the state of the room. Not the standard of anything in it.

You have a room made safe by God rather than by its condition, and a bedroom that nobody sees has never once been a report on the woman who sleeps in it. The Spirit of God is the one named as the one who makes a person dwell in safety, and it is written in Psalm 4:8 that He is the only one who does it.

The room with no audience

Let me stay on the audience thing, because I think it is the real hinge.

Everything in your house has an implied viewer. The front room is for whoever might come. The kitchen is for the family. The hallway is what somebody sees first.

The bedroom has none. Nobody is coming in. There is no version of a Tuesday where somebody inspects it.

You are the only viewer that room has ever had, and a space with no audience has never once been a space that does not count. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a room nobody else enters, and Psalm 4:8 says the Lord alone is the one who makes a person dwell in safety there.

And here is what happens, over years, to a room with no audience.

It gets everything last. The good lamp goes to the front room. The nice thing that was given to you goes where people will see it. The chair in the bedroom becomes where the clothes live. Nothing in there is chosen. It is just what ended up in there.

Which means the one room in your house that exists purely for you has, over about a decade, quietly become the room with the least care in it.

You are somebody worth choosing one thing for, and a decade of a room getting the leftovers has never once been a measure of what the person in it is worth. The written word names God as the one who makes a person dwell in safety in Psalm 4:8, and the same Spirit who does that is in the room at six in the morning when the light stays off.

And there is a second cost, and it is the one that actually shows up in a day.

The first thing you see when you open your eyes sets something. Not in a mystical way. Just in the ordinary way that the first thirty seconds of a morning sets a tone that takes about two hours to change.

At the moment the first thing you see is the dark, and then the floor, and then the door.

You are able to change what a morning starts with, and one object placed where the eyes land first has never once been too small a thing to matter. The Spirit of God is the one who meets a woman in the first thirty seconds of a day, and Psalm 4:8 puts peace and dwelling right at the hinge between lying down and waking.

Ten minutes with the light on

So here is the assignment.

Sit in your bedroom for ten minutes tonight with the light on, and move one thing onto the surface nearest the bed.

Sit. On the end of the bed or in the chair with the clothes moved off it. Overhead light on, or the lamp, but on.

Ten minutes on a clock. Not tidying. Not planning. Sitting in a lit room, looking at it.

You are looking properly at a room that has been unlooked at for years, and ten minutes with the light on has never once been an indulgence in a house. The Holy Spirit is the one in a bedroom with a woman who is seeing it awake for the first time in a long while, and it is written in Psalm 4:8 that the Lord alone makes a person dwell in safety.

It will feel like a waste of ten minutes. It is not, and the reason is that you cannot choose anything for a room you have never actually seen.

Then, before you get up, move one thing onto the nightstand or whatever surface is nearest the bed.

Something that is not functional. Not the phone, not the water, not the thing you need. A photograph from another room. Something small that a person kept because they liked it. A candle nobody has ever lit.

One thing, placed where your eyes land before anything else tomorrow.

You are choosing the first thing a morning shows you, and one object on a nightstand has never once been beneath the notice of the God who is there when the eyes open. The Spirit of God is the one who meets a person at the start of a day, and Psalm 4:8 fastens dwelling and safety to the moment of lying down.