There Is An Hour I Dread

There is an hour. You know which one it is and you know which child.

It starts around a particular time, and you feel it coming about forty minutes before it arrives, in your shoulders first and then somewhere behind your ribs.

And you have never said this to anybody. Not to your closest friend, not to anybody at church, and certainly not to anybody in your own family, because the sentence sounds monstrous when you try it out in your head.

I dread an hour with my own child.

That is the sentence, and you have never once let it out of the building.

I am not going to give you a way to manage that hour. That is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out. And I am not going to tell you it is not really dread, because you know the difference between tiredness and dread, and this is the second one.

What time I am afraid

There is half a verse in Psalm 56 that has an extraordinary amount of room in it for a person in your position.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. (Psalm 56:3, King James Version)

What time I am afraid. Not if. When.

David does not open with an apology for being afraid, and he does not treat the fear as a problem to be cleared up before the trusting can start. He states it as a recurring hour and then says what he does in it.

You are allowed to be afraid of an hour, and the fear has never once had to be sorted out before anything else could happen. Psalm 56:3 says what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a kitchen at twenty past three.

And notice the two things sit together in one short line. Afraid, and trusting, in the same breath, with no interval between them.

That is worth having, because you have been assuming that the dread has to go before you can be a decent parent in that hour, and this verse puts them side by side and carries on.

You are able to trust in the middle of the dread, and there has never once been a requirement to feel differently first. It is written in Psalm 56:3 that the trusting happens at the time of the fear, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts them in the same sentence without embarrassment.

The dread is about an hour, not about a person

Now let me separate two things that have been welded together in your head for a long time.

The dread is not aimed at a child. It is aimed at an hour, and that hour has a shape, and the shape is made of tiredness, and a particular kind of demand, and a room, and a time of day when there is the least left in anybody.

That is not a distinction offered to make you feel better. It is a genuinely different fact, and holding the two apart matters, because a person who thinks they dread their child will start avoiding the child, and a person who dreads an hour can still walk into it.

And the difference shows in the evidence. There is no dread on a Saturday morning. There is none in a car. The dread has a timetable, which means it belongs to the hour.

You are looking at something with a timetable, and a thing that keeps office hours has never once been a feeling about a person. It is written in Psalm 56:3 that the fear has a time attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who reads the clock on a thing correctly.

Psalm 56:3 names a time rather than a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a difficult hour from a difficult child.

You are not somebody who dreads their own child, and an hour with a shape has never once been the same as a person. Psalm 56:3 attaches the fear to a time rather than to anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps those two apart when a tired mind welds them together.

And here is the plain thing, because this has become a verdict on you.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about how much you love that child.

It is a body reacting to a repeated difficult hour, which is what bodies do, and it happens to nurses and teachers and everybody who has ever done the same hard thing at the same time every day.

You have not stopped loving that child, and forty minutes of dread beforehand has never once been a measurement of anything. The written word puts the fear and the trust in the same short line in Psalm 56:3, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to read a shoulder tightening as a report on a heart.

Nothing here is about what is wrong with them

One straight thing, because a site like this could easily go somewhere it should not.

Nothing in this article is a suggestion that something is wrong with your child. This is not the place for that and I am not going to speculate about somebody I have not met.

If the feeling here is real worry about a child rather than exhaustion, then speak to somebody qualified. A doctor, the school, a counselor. Say plainly what has been noticed and let a trained person tell you what it is.

And if it is not that, and it is the hour, then it is the hour, and the hour is allowed to be hard without anybody being at fault.

You are permitted to have a hard hour with nobody to blame for it, and it has never once required a culprit to be found. It is written in Psalm 56:3 that the trust goes into the time of fear itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who stays in an hour without handing out a diagnosis.

Psalm 56:3 is about a person in a difficult time rather than about diagnosing anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with a parent in an hour without offering a theory about anybody.

You are held through that hour without anybody being diagnosed, and it has never once required an explanation to be survivable. Psalm 56:3 attaches trust to a time of fear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at twenty past four with no theory in His hand.