Psalm 30:5: How Long a Night Is

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

Psalm 30:5 (NIV)

How Long a Night Is

The visitors’ lot at the nursing home fills up around six and it’s empty by eight. One man parks near the fence in the same spot every evening, and on the way back to his car he cries where anyone could see him and doesn’t turn his face away or wipe it fast. An aide who’s watched him do this for a year and a half brings him a paper cup of water on the worst nights and says nothing about any of it.

A man just pulled up out of something counts time differently afterward. David had been ill, close enough to dying that he uses the word pit for where he was, and when he sings about it he sings in lengths. His anger gets a moment and his favor gets a lifetime. The weeping gets a night.

A card with that line printed on it keeps the morning and drops the night. A person awake through one knows how long it runs, and knows it’ll end, and at three in the morning neither of those does much for the other.

The psalm doesn’t call the weeping small, and it doesn’t treat it as a failure of nerve. David gives it the whole night. Nobody comes in at eleven o’clock to tell it that time’s up, and the man crying isn’t the one who set the hour.

The line itself leaves the morning undescribed. Rejoicing comes in the morning, and David goes no further with it. I used to read that as the next sunrise. These days I read it as a morning that’s coming without a date on it. Nothing here says the morning gives back what the night took either.

David sings about a length. The dark has an end on it, the end isn’t his to move, and it isn’t his to miss either.

The aide fills the paper cup at the fountain by the elevator and stands there waiting for him to come around the corner.