Weekly Devotion
March 8, 2026

Two a.m.

Psalm 6:6-7
“I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eyes waste away because of grief; they grow weak because of all my foes.”

I am part of the two o’clock in the morning club. You’re welcome to join. Perhaps you already have and you don’t even know it. Two o’clock is when I wake up to worry about the things I fear, the anxieties that plague me, and the actions I regret. I’ve wept more bitter tears and composed more despairing letters of resignation or declarations of bankruptcy at 2:00 a.m. that at all other times of the day combined. Normally not a paranoid person, I can devise incredible conspiracy theories and convince myself of symptoms I’ve self-diagnosed. Who knows why? Maybe it’s the darkness or the weariness that leads mu mind down dreary and haunted paths. I just know that the same challenges and crises I an face during the day often threaten to overwhelm me at night. Even with my experiences of having nighttime terrors become daytime manageable issues, I’m still a member of the 2:00 a.m. club.

Whether our struggle is with a “two o’clock fear” or something deeper and substantially longer lasting, like so many of the laments, the lack of specifics in this Psalm releases it to be the vehicle for our prayers. Most of us have something that fills us with dread. Like the psalmist , we know what terror feels like in the middle of the night. So great is the struggle that in the course of the prayer the words run down to a helpless, “How long?” Sometimes the beautiful prayers we read in collections or hear offered in worship can depress us too. “Why can’t I pray like that when I really need to?” The psalmist’s inarticulate cry speaks volume-not only of pain and worry, but also of relationship. God knows what I’m trying to say when my tongue stumbles and my brain goes numb.

It would seem that the prayer is enough for the psalmist. Without any apparent change in the situation, the lament ends with a confident declaration of conviction. Maybe the sun came up. More likely, as with so many who have tested God and found God trustworthy, the psalmist is already counting on the touch of God’s grace. So, welcome to the 2:00 a.m. club. It’s a wide and diverse group. And if your chosen hour is a different hour, we’ll let you in anyway.

RB

An excerpt from “Lamentations for Lent” Edited by Ross Bartlett.