Weary With My Groaning Is In The Book

The study is the smallest room in the house and it has the desk his father had, and one lamp, and books arranged in a way that made sense in 2009.

He is in here most nights between about one and three, because that is what the nights are now.

Sixty-two years old. Four years.

He reads. That is what he does with those hours. He is not a man who watches things at two in the morning. He reads the Psalms, mostly, in the same edition he has had since he was twenty-six, and he underlines, and he has a notebook.

And every night, at some point, there is a sound that wants to come out of him.

It is not words. It is lower than words and older than words and it comes from somewhere under the ribs, and it has been coming for four years, and he has never once let it out. He swallows it. He has got very good at swallowing it. His wife, asleep on the other side of the wall, has never heard it.

Because he has a conviction, and it has been in him longer than the illness. It is that complaint is a spiritual failure. That the mark of a mature man is that he does not make that noise. That God has already given him a great deal and would find the sound ungrateful, and that a groan is a bill presented to somebody who has already paid.

So he sits in the small room at two in the morning with a psalm open and a sound behind his teeth.

If you have swallowed one, you know it does not feel like faith when you do it. It feels like manners.

The groaning is in the text and God kept it

Weigh it first and weigh it fully, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it does not get abbreviated.

What this costs is not the nights. It is the swallowing. It costs you the one form of speech that fits what you are actually carrying, because there are no words for it and the sound was the only thing that was ever going to be accurate. It costs your wife the truth, which she would have wanted. It costs you four years of company you might have had. And it costs you the prayers, in a way, because a man praying with a sound held behind his teeth is praying with the most honest part of himself deliberately excluded.

I am not calling that small and I am not measuring it against anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the hours between one and three have gone past weariness into thinking the house would be lighter without you in the small room at all, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your wife on the other side of that wall, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that on his own, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who come and sit in a small room.

Now, the Psalms, which you have open anyway, and a verse you will have underlined and read past.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.Psalm 6:6

Read what is in that sentence and read what is not.

What is in it: a man in the dark, exhausted, making a sound, and being specific about the hours and the bedding. He does not tidy it. He tells you the bed is wet.

What is not in it: an apology. There is no line before it excusing the noise. There is no line after it in which he pulls himself together for the reader's benefit. And critically, there is no correction anywhere in the psalm or anywhere in the book from God, who could have edited this and did not.

You are holding a book in which somebody groaned out loud and God kept it in. Psalm 6:6 sits in the canon uncorrected, and the Holy Spirit who inspired it is the one who put a man's worst night in a text that has been read for three thousand years.

Now think about what that means for a conviction you have carried longer than your illness. You believe the noise would be ungrateful. But the noise is already in the Bible, in the first person, in a psalm written by the man God called after His own heart, and nobody in heaven has ever treated it as a bill presented to somebody who already paid.

You have never been the first person to make that sound in front of God. That is written into Psalm 6, and His Spirit in you is the one who intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered, which means the sound you are swallowing is a language the Spirit Himself uses.

Sit with that second half, because it is the part that undoes four years of manners. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit helps our weakness and intercedes with groanings too deep for words. The word is the same kind of sound. The Spirit of God has a groan in His vocabulary.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because you have had four years of good and careful advice.

It does not say the nights are changing. It makes no promise about your body or the hours between one and three, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and any man who is confident about somebody else's fifth year is talking about himself.

And it does not rank you. There is no line in that psalm comparing David's night to anybody else's, and there is no ranking on this site either.

You were heard exactly, and the sound was never the problem. Scripture keeps the groaning in the text without a correction, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who carries it upward when there are no words on it.