I Water It At Night Because I Cannot Sleep

It is quiet at two.

That is the part nobody talks about. The house has a different quality at that hour, and the window looks different, and the plant is right there, and you are up anyway.

So you water it. And it does not need water, and you know that, and you do it.

And the truth is that the watering is not really the event. The event is that you are standing at a window at two in the morning with something to do, instead of lying in the dark with nothing.

Before anything practical, then, a word about the hour rather than about the plant.

Being awake at two is not a failure, and what you do with your hands at that hour is not a symptom of anything.

If you are awake night after night, and it has been going on, that is worth taking to a doctor. Not because something is wrong with you, but because a person who cannot sleep should not be carrying that alone, and a crisis line or the number 988 is there in America for any night that goes past what one person can hold.

He giveth his beloved sleep

There is a line in the Psalms about sleep that is more pointed than people expect, because of what comes before it.

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, King James Version)

For so he giveth his beloved sleep.

You are called beloved in the same sentence that names the sitting up late, and no night awake has ever once moved you out of that word. Psalm 127:2 says for so he giveth his beloved sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman at a window at two in the morning.

Look at what is being called vain. Rising early, sitting up late, eating the bread of sorrows.

That is not a rebuke of hard work. It is a description of a particular kind of exhausting effort, the kind that comes from carrying something that will not resolve, and the psalm calls it vain because it does not produce what it is trying to produce.

And then the contrast is not effort done better. It is a gift. He giveth.

You were never in a system where rest is earned by the right behavior, and no amount of managing a night has ever once produced sleep in anybody. The Spirit of God is what makes that reach a body rather than only a mind, and Psalm 127 is where the giving is written down.

What the hands are actually doing

Now the practical half, and it is about the hands rather than the plant.

Lying in the dark with nothing to do is harder than almost anything. The mind goes where it goes and there is nothing to interrupt it, and everybody who has been awake at that hour knows it.

So the body goes looking for a job. Any job. And the plant is a job that is available, silent, requires no lights on, and produces a visible result.

That is not madness. That is a sensible body solving an unbearable problem with the only material in the room.

You are doing the most reasonable thing available to a person at that hour, and going to a windowsill at two has never once been a strange thing for a body to do. What is written in Psalm 127:2 names the sitting up late without condemning anybody in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so over a dark kitchen.

But the plant cannot take it, and that is the only reason this needs changing at all.

A plant watered at two in the morning three nights a week is being watered three times more than it wants, in the coolest hours when it uses least, which is the worst possible timing.

So the hands need a different job at that hour, and it needs to be one that costs nothing.

You are able to give your hands something else at two in the morning, and needing a job at that hour has never once been the same as being unwell. The Spirit of God is the one who provides the substitute rather than removing the need, and Psalm 127 is the ground under it.

Leave the can downstairs

So here is the instruction and both halves matter.

Put the watering can in the kitchen tonight, out of reach of wherever you end up standing. And take a glass of water to bed with you.

The can downstairs removes the possibility, which is worth far more than a resolution. At two in the morning nobody negotiates with themselves successfully, and nobody should have to.

And the glass of water is the substitute. It gives the hands a job that is over in four seconds, costs nothing, and helps rather than harms, because people who are up at that hour are usually thirsty and nobody thinks to be.

You are giving the hands a job that helps you instead of one that costs a plant, and a glass of water by a bed has never once been a small provision. Psalm 127:2 says he giveth his beloved sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman at two in the morning with her hands around a glass.