I have never set foot in Cuba. I cannot give you the names of the people on that wall, and I am not going to stand in a pulpit an ocean away and pretend I understand the politics that put them there. What I have is the picture, and the picture has not left me: an entire city that could not sleep, going out into the open air together, because the open air was cooler than home. Reports say the buses have largely stopped for want of fuel. So people walk. And at night, some of them walk to the sea.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from heat you cannot get away from. It is not dramatic. Nobody photographs it. It is simply the slow grinding down of a person who has not had a full night's rest in weeks, who cannot keep milk cold or a fan turning, who lies awake doing arithmetic about tomorrow. I have sat with people in that kind of tiredness ΓÇö different causes, same hollow look. The chemotherapy that will not let them sleep. The night shift that never ends. The grief that arrives faithfully at two in the morning. Suffering that has no clean ending tends to embarrass us. We would rather have a disaster with a rescue at the end of it.
But Scripture does not flinch at the long night. The psalmist wrote for people on the road with nowhere soft to lie: "Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night."
Notice what that promise does not say. It does not say the sun will not shine, or that the heat will break tonight, or that the power will come back on by morning. It says the Lord is a shade. A shade does not abolish the sun; it stands between you and it. And it says He does not sleep. That is the line I keep returning to. On a boardwalk in Havana, in a country where a whole population has been robbed of sleep, there was One awake over every one of them, and He was not awake out of anxiety. He was awake because He was keeping watch.
I find I need the other half of that comfort just as much. David wrote: "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee." When the grid fails, the world goes invisible. Whole neighborhoods drop off the map. Nobody outside can see in. But God does not require our electricity to see His children. The blackout is not a blindfold on heaven. To Him, that dark stretch of coastline was as bright as noon, and every sleeper on it was known by name.
I notice something else in the story, and I think it matters. They did not each suffer alone behind their own shut doors. They went out together. There is an old wisdom in that, older than any grid. When the house becomes unbearable, you find your neighbors. The early church knew this ΓÇö they held things in common not as a program but as an instinct, because affliction shared is affliction halved and joy shared is joy doubled. If you are in a hard season right now, that is my first counsel to you: do not do it in the dark by yourself. Go out to the wall where the others are.
And my second is simply this. Pray for people you will never meet. Tonight, when your air conditioning hums and your lamp comes on at the touch of a switch, remember the ones lying on stone by the sea, waiting for a breeze. Ask God to be their shade. He is already awake.