Soul Care Network

When What Happened Won’t Stay in the Past

A word of hope from somebody who knows the bad nights

Asaph ran the music at the house of God, and one of the songs he turned in was about a night he could not get through. He did not clean it up before he handed it over. He cried out until his voice gave out. His hands stayed up the whole night, and he says plainly that he refused to be comforted, that people tried and he would not have it (Ps 77:1-2). “You have kept me from closing my eyes; I am troubled and cannot speak” (Ps 77:4). Then he lay there going back over old days and old songs, and the questions started coming out of him. If you have been waking up at the same hour every night with the whole thing already running, or getting up to check the doors, or lying there doing the arithmetic on how many hours are left before you have to be a person in front of somebody, Asaph is not a stranger to you. That song did not get filed away somewhere private. It went into the hymnbook of Israel and God’s people sang it together in public. Whatever last night was like at your house, a night like it is already in the Bible, and God did not hide it in the back.

Do these things today

Ask God the questions you think you are not allowed to ask. Asaph asked whether the Lord had rejected him for good and whether God had forgotten how to be gracious (Ps 77:7-9). Nobody edited that out, so ask yours the way he did.
Write down what sets it off. Be specific on paper: the diesel smell, that stretch of road, a raised voice through a wall, the date coming up on the calendar. Then decide now what you are going to do the next time one of them hits you, which verse you will say and who you will text, because you do not want to be making that call in the middle of it.
Make a list of 3 things God has done. 2 of them from Scripture and 1 from your own life, in your handwriting, on paper you can reach without turning on a light. You are going to need them at 2 in the morning and you will not be able to think of them then.
Tell one person tonight that you are not sleeping. You do not have to give him the whole story, just that part.

Safety, your body, and the bad nights

If the person who hurt you still has a way to reach you, getting out of his reach comes ahead of every other thing you do this week. Move if you have to, tell somebody today, and where a crime happened, report it. God put authorities in place for the protection of people like you, and calling on them is one of the ways He does it.

Your body is taking the effects of this too. Sleep that will not come no matter what you try, a heart that pounds over nothing, the startle, the shaking, all of that belongs in a doctor’s office. Going there is wisdom about a body God made. And if you have started thinking the world would run fine without you in it, that goes to your pastor tonight, in so many words, along with a call or a text to 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

A man who could not close his eyes

Something in the way Asaph tells it is going to sound familiar. He has not forgotten one thing, and the remembering is what he cannot shut off, and it comes at night, in detail, on a loop he never started (Ps 77:5-6). People will tell you the work is to dig the thing up. Yours comes up on its own, halfway down a grocery aisle, and you did not go looking for it. “I am grieved that the right hand of the Most High has changed” (Ps 77:10). From where he is lying that night, God looks like somebody who has changed His mind about being good, and Asaph writes that down in that condition and hands it to the choir. A lot of believers have thought it, and he is the one who put his name on it.

“I will remember the LORD’s works; yes, I will remember your ancient wonders” (Ps 77:11). The memory that has been working him over all night is the one thing he has, so he turns it around and points it at something older than his trouble. He goes all the way back to the sea, the water that saw God and trembled, thunder in the whirlwind, the ground shaking, a whole nation walking out of slavery on dry ground (Ps 77:16-20). Verse 19 is the one I would put in front of you. “Your way went through the sea and your path through the vast water, but your footprints were unseen” (Ps 77:19). God was in that water and He left nothing behind that Israel could point at afterward. Where God was standing when it happened to you is the question you have probably worn out, and that verse is where I would start you on the answer. He was in the water that night, whether anybody could see His footprints or not. And the psalm ends right there, without Asaph ever telling us whether he got to sleep.

The memory lies to you

The heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable, and Jeremiah asks who can even understand it (Jer 17:9). Your memory does not play any of this back to you neutrally.

The loudest one tells you it is happening now. Everything in you files it that way, and your body reacts the way a body is supposed to react to danger. You cannot always control what a sound or a smell does to you, and that reaction is not sin. What you can do is talk back to it. It happened, it is over, and you are years and miles away from it now. Nobody is asking you to think positively. Those are facts about where you are standing, and a man is allowed to say facts to himself in his own kitchen. Then do what Asaph did and go further back, to what God has done (Ps 77:11).

You will also hear that you ought to be over this by now, usually in your own voice, though people have probably said it out loud to you too. 2 people can go through the same night and come out carrying different weights, and that difference is not a grade on anybody’s faith. Asaph had the worship job at the house of God, and that did not keep him off the floor.

There is a quieter one that goes after your name. It says that what happened is who you are now, and that everything after it is a smaller life built carefully around a wound. Asaph took his bearings from what God did at the sea, and God’s people have gone on calling him a songwriter ever since.

This week

Read Psalm 77 every morning, all 20 verses, and do not skip the ugly middle. Somewhere in there Asaph quits going over his own trouble and starts going over what God did at the sea. Find the verse where that happens and mark it.
Get in front of your pastor this week and tell him how the nights are actually going, and if they are not changing, ask him about a biblical counselor. If somebody who knows about the nights gave you Psalm 77, that man has heard some of it already. Give him the specific parts of it, because a church cannot help carry something it has only heard about in outline.
Pray, read the Bible, help others, every single day. That has been my rule since my first year sober. On the days when your own head is the worst place to be, having somewhere to go and somebody who needs you there can be the difference between a hard day and a lost one.
Write this on a card and keep it in your pocket: Asaph could not sleep, so he went further back than the trouble (Ps 77:11).

One last thing

Asaph wrote that psalm down and handed it to the choir, because other people were going to need it, and here you are. I have spent my share of small hours going over things I would give a great deal to forget, so I am not talking to you from the outside. God left Asaph’s worst night in the songbook where everybody could find it, and He is not ashamed of yours. Put your 3 things on paper before you go to bed tonight.

Scripture quotations are from the Christian Standard Bible.

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