It's 3 AM, and you're wide awake. You didn't ask to be.
The thoughts come in all at once. Did I lock the car? Why did I say that in the meeting? Can we make it this month? And then the quiet one, sitting underneath all the others: what happens if it all falls apart?
Everybody else in the house is asleep. You're the only one lying there running the numbers on your worst-case scenario. At noon you could have talked yourself down. At 3 AM, you can't think straight.
Here's the deal. That 3 AM moment isn't really about the clock. It's a window into something a lot of us carry around all day long. We just stay busy enough in the daylight to keep from looking at it. When the lights go out and the noise stops, it finally gets a word in.
It has a name. Anxiety. And if you battle it, hear this first: that doesn't mean you're weak, and it doesn't mean you're not a Christian. It means you're human. Nearly one in five adults wrestles with it in a given year. If it's not you, it's someone you love.
Now notice what anxiety actually steals. Not your job. Not your bank account. Your peace. It walks in the room, and peace is the first thing out the door.
Here's what I've learned about losing your peace, though. You don't just sit there without it. You go looking for it. All of us do. We just look in different places.
Some of us go looking in control. If I can manage every variable and keep a tight enough grip on my calendar, my kids, my career, then I'll finally be able to exhale. Some of us go looking in numbing. We scroll it away, binge it away, buy it away — something that feels like calm for about forty-five minutes. Some of us go looking in approval. If enough people are happy with me, then I must be okay. And some of us go looking in achievement. One more win, one more milestone, and then I'll feel settled.
Here's what all of those have in common. They work. For a minute. And then they don't.
There's an old prophet named Jeremiah who watched God's own people do this exact thing, and the way God describes it ought to stop us cold. "My people have committed two sins," he says. "They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water" (Jeremiah 2:13).
Stay with me, because that picture is everything. In the ancient world a spring was gold — naturally fed, always flowing, reliable even in a drought. A cistern was the backup: a pit you carved into rock and plastered yourself to catch rainwater. And if that plaster ever cracked, even a hairline, the whole thing was worthless. You wouldn't even know it was empty until the day you needed it and lowered your bucket into a dry hole.
So God brings two charges. Number one: you left me. You walked away from the spring. Number two, and this is the one that stings: you left me for that. For a hole in the ground you dug yourself, lined yourself, and filled yourself — just in case I didn't come through.
I'm telling you, that's what control and numbing and approval and achievement actually are. Cisterns. Every one of them is something you built to hold your peace, and every one of them leaks. You dig it in a panic, you pour yourself into it, and by the time you need it most, it's dry. It was never built to hold living water in the first place.
So here's the honest question, and I'd rather you sit in it than skim past it: what cistern have you been digging lately? Name it. Not to beat yourself up, but to see it clearly. Because you can't walk back to the spring while you're still convinced the cistern is going to come through for you.
And here's the good news underneath all of it. The night before the cross, when Jesus knew his friends were about to face the most anxious hours of their lives, he didn't hand them a strategy. He handed them his peace. "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid" (John 14:27).
The world gives you cistern peace — the kind that holds up fine as long as the circumstances cooperate and leaks the second they don't. His peace doesn't depend on your circumstances. It depends on him. And everywhere he sends you this week — the meeting, the waiting room, the hard conversation, even 3 AM — his peace goes with you.
So this week, when something comes to steal your peace, don't grab the shovel. Go back to the spring.
We'd love to have you join us on Sunday.
