It Was The Middle Of The Night

He has worked out, quite carefully, that there is nowhere he can go after about ten o'clock.

He would not put it that dramatically. He would say people have work in the morning.

But he has done the arithmetic, and he keeps it updated, and if you sat him down he could tell you exactly why each name on the list is unavailable. This one has small children. This one starts at six. This one would come, absolutely would come, and would then be tired on Thursday and he would know he had done that.

So the list resolves, every time, to nobody.

He is not friendless. That is what makes it strange from the outside. There are eleven people who love him and would be genuinely hurt to hear this, and he knows that too, and it changes nothing, because his difficulty has never been who cares about him.

His difficulty is the hour.

Something about it being dark, and late, and people being asleep, turns a house full of people who love him into a set of closed doors. Not closed by them. Closed by him, from the outside, at about ten o'clock, every single night for years.

And so the bad hours are spent alone, which is precisely when they should not be.

So let me ask you.

Where would you go at two in the morning?

He came out at night and went straight to a house

There is a scene in Acts that is usually told for the miracle at the start, and I want the ordinary part at the end of it.

Peter is in prison. He is brought out in the night, and the chapter is quite clear that he does not understand what is happening until he is standing in the street.

And then, in the dark, having just come out of a locked place with nowhere arranged, here is what he does.

When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.Acts 12:12

Read it twice.

He does not wait for morning. He does not consider whether it is a reasonable hour. He walks to a house, in the middle of the night, and knocks.

Acts 12 has a man going straight to somebody's door in the dark with nothing arranged and no message sent, and the Spirit who moved that account left the hour in the text rather than tidying it out, so two in the morning has never once been outside the times when a door is a door.

And here is the second half, and it is the half I love.

The house was awake.

Not because they were expecting him. They famously were not, and when the girl at the door said it was Peter they told her she was out of her mind. They were awake because they were praying about the situation, which is to say they were awake because they cared.

Acts 12 has a lit house at an hour nobody keeps, with no idea he was coming, and the Spirit was in that room before the knock ever came, which means the arithmetic you run at ten o'clock has never been a description of who is actually awake.

Now, let me speak plainly to you, hermano, because you are being very reasonable and it is costing you everything.

Your calculation is kind. Every entry on it is an act of consideration and I am not going to mock a man for not wanting to tire his friends.

But you have made yourself the judge of what those eleven people are willing to be woken for, and you have judged it low, and none of them has ever been consulted.

Acts 12 shows a household who would have been furious to be left out of that night, and the Spirit had them awake and praying for exactly that man, so deciding on somebody's behalf that they would rather sleep has never once been the same thing as asking them.