The Hour that Tells the Truth

When do you feel most alive?

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. It’s 3:00 a.m. You toss and turn. You can’t sleep. You worry about how you can’t sleep. Your anxious brain kicks in and starts a well-worn litany: the list of your flaws, faults, and failings.

For the past two years, I haven’t been sleeping well. We had a baby, for starters, which never increases sleep. But once he started snoozing through the night, I still couldn’t find good rest. Often I’d lie awake from 2-4 a.m. every night for weeks, stewing about the latest global crisis, the state of my inbox, the fact that I never get my kids to write thank-you notes for their presents and our families must think we’re raising a bunch of ingrates.

(You know your own spiral, but my hunch is ours might rhyme.)

One night, in the midst of probing for the zillionth time why a particular person in my life does not like me, I had a thought clear as a bell:

This is not an hour that tells the truth.

3:00 a.m. is not a good hour for me. I do not find joy, or peace, or hope in this time. If I am awake for it, I’m in a place of gloom and doom, literally and figuratively.

So lately when I stir at night and the downward spiral starts to slide, I remind myself: this is not an hour that tells the truth. This is not an hour you can trust.

The refrain has been exceedingly helpful for me. I offer it today in case you (like most people on the planet) have struggled with stress, anxiety, depression, or despair in the past two years. We’re living in dangerous and difficult times, but certain hours are even harder than others. It helps to tell the truth.

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Last week I gave a retreat to Catholic school teachers in Atlanta. I asked them to reflect on a question I often use on retreats around vocation and calling:

When or where do you feel most alive at work?

I watched their faces as I posed the question. Some nodded, some clouded, some teared up. Most drifted away in thought, sifting through recent days or weeks—even years back, before the grueling grind of pandemic education took its toll. A few of them found the spark and jotted it down.

The times when we feel most alive? These are hours of truth.

I feel most alive when I find flow while I’m writing, when I’m giving a talk or leading a retreat, when I delight in the joy of my family, or when I am out in nature. I feel the electricity of connection, grounded into the ground of my being, which is God.

But while I have a habit of noticing and giving thanks for these “most alive moments,” I have not realized that these are also hours that tell me truth—about God, about others, about the world, about myself. 

Which hours tell you the truth? Which do not?

Notorious liars of hours in my life include the 60 minutes before dinner each night when I question my choice to become a parent (low blood sugar for everyone is a hangry mess). Apple’s weekly Screen Time Report also reminds me that many hours I spend on social media are not life-giving, but judgment-provoking or anxiety-inducing. 

Time to face the truth.

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Let it be known that truth-telling hours are not always easy, just like the vocations they signal. Holy Week is edging on the horizon, beckoning us into hard places and heavy stories. But these holiest of days also hold hours that tell the truth. 

Over and over in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his friends that the hour is coming.

The hour is coming and is now here when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth (John 4:23). The hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live (5:25). The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but I will tell you clearly (16:25). The hour is coming, and is already here, when each of you will be scattered to their own home and you will leave me alone (16:32). 

An hour that tells the truth can be daunting. But it can bring us to the place of becoming fully alive.

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified…I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour (John 12:23, 27).

This is the weightest question of what it means to be human: pondering the purpose of life itself and our place within it.

Did Jesus mean the hour he would die or the hour he would rise—or the hour that awaits when he returns? Yes. All of it. 

His is the hour that tells the truth.

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Last month I met two writing friends at the art institute. We caught up on life and work and everything in between. When I texted my husband that I was leaving and could pick up Indian food for dinner, he responded: takeout won’t be ready till 5. Stay! 

Suddenly my old art-history-major self rose up inside me like a roaring fire. The hours I spent analyzing artworks and artists and theories in college. The hours I spent wandering museums alone when I lived abroad. 

I had forgotten this was a time and place that told the truth.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon alone in the art museum. My body and soul came alive like grass greening awake after a long winter. I wandered and wandered, lost and found, watched the crowds, wrote in my head, remembered the necessity of beauty, rediscovered a part of myself I hadn’t known I had forgotten. I’ve been holding that hour close to my chest for weeks now. 

The power of an hour that tells the truth.

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Find my books here: Everyday Sacrament | Grieving Together | Prayers for Pregnancy & Birth | To Bless Our Callings | Living Your Discipleship

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Photo of the Musée d'Orsay by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash

p.s. Turns out that following the experts’ advice & eliminating Everything You’re Supposed to Avoid Before Bed Anyway—screens, wine, dessert—actually works wonders, and I’m sleeping much better these days. In case you need another truth to ponder in the thin hours of the night!