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# The watches of the night
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-watches-of-the-night/
- Published: 2026-09-19T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-19T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"When I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy." — Psalm 63:6-7*

I was awake at three and I did not mind it.

This is new. For years the three o'clock waking was the worst hour of my life. The first year after Earl I woke at three most nights and lay there in the dark on my side of a bed that had stopped needing sides, and the house made its noises and none of them were him, and I would go through the whole thing again from the beginning. Three in the morning is a courtroom. Everything you have ever done wrong shows up with a lawyer.

It stopped being that. I could not tell you when. Somewhere in the last two or three years the three o'clock waking turned into something else, and now when I come up out of sleep and the room is black and the clock says three I just lie there.

I do not pray in any way you would recognize as praying. I do not have words at three in the morning. I lie on my side and I am aware of the house and the dark and the dog breathing on his rug and the fact that I am still here, and I am aware of God in the room in the same undramatic way I am aware of the ceiling, and after a while I go back to sleep.

The psalm calls it the watches of the night. That is a soldier's phrase. Somebody standing a post in the dark, awake on purpose, while everyone else sleeps.

I did not choose to stand a watch. I was woken. But I have started to think that being awake at three might be an assignment rather than an affliction, and that on the nights I cannot sleep there might be some reason for a seventy-seven-year-old woman to be conscious in a dark house four miles out a county road while the rest of the valley is not.

I do not know what the reason is. I do not need to. Somebody is up. That is the whole of the job.

It is Saturday. The week is finished. I will be in the classroom tomorrow with the children for the first time since May.

*Lord, in the watches of the night, I am here.*