3:30 AM

Ask people to name their favorite part of the day and many will say sunrise or sunset, or the point in the day when they get off work and head home, or maybe early evening, sitting around the supper table with family.

My favorite time of the day has come to be the middle of the night.

My wife sleeps at my side, and my kids sleep across the hall, close enough where I can hear their breathing through the shadows and the darkness. My dog is at the foot of our bed, snoring, but not too loudly, and outside, in the cold air, train whistles can be heard intermittently from the nearby tracks of Saint Paul's lone railway station.

In the streetlight glow out the bedroom window, I see the snow resting in the large pine branches of my neighbors spruce. It's quiet out there. Silent like only  cold winter nights can be. But my family is warm, safe, and at peace beneath their blankets. In a frenetic, complicated, wild, whirling world they are at peace, and thus, so am I.

This is my favorite time. When I'm awake in bed I take it all in with gratitude.
It's a sweet old world at this hour, imbued with a humble divinity.

I imagine all the sleeping souls across town in their darkened houses. I imagine the silence holding court from room to room. I think about the stars above shining down on us all, and, for a stretch of time, I see the world as a sacred place.

Sometimes, I also think about this: Stalin slept, Pol Pot slept, Idi Amin slept, Hitler slept. During those hours there was no rage, no wrath, no retribution. They were like babes in a crib, vulnerable, inert. Their minds were not planning the next atrocity. The world, for a few hours, was given a reprieve. It wasn't long enough, of course, but there it was, a small gift to the planet: they slept.

It may be a kind of surrender, to love the middle of the night so dearly. But I often find myself smiling there, hands behind my head, eyes focused on the ceiling or turned toward the window staring at the snow in the pine.

I know dawn is in the offing, but it's hours away. There's time, time just to think, or not to think, to rest a while, and place all one's cares in the hands of God.

Maybe a memory from that day will arise. With nothing but time, the memory can be explored anew, reexamined, reshaped in the mind. Maybe one of those grand philosophical questions will come marching along. The ones that are too noble to fit in the pedestrian world of the business day. So be it. There's time to entertain it all.

And if the brain grows tired and the body softens and releases its hold on awareness, there's always sleep, a lovely fall from that height that lands one in a carefree abyss, offering gentle rejuvenation.

I have seen many sunsets and many sunrises. I've reveled in the glory of a bright autumn afternoon and bathed in a summer twilight with its pink and purple sky. The 24 hour day delivers genuine pearls with its occasional monotony and heartbreak. But if I had to grasp only one gem to place it in my treasure box, I would choose the still and sublime darkness of the middle of the night, and that vantage point, from my second story bedroom, with my family close by, hearing old Shep snore, lost in that train whistle.