Her sky blue scrubs were slimming. Her curly blonde hair looked lively.

I didn’t know what she was talking about when she asked me the question. It was the type of thing you think you’d know about yourself. But you’re never sure of yourself when you answer.

“Do you grind your teeth?”

I had when I was a kid so I could make that great tooth-on-tooth noise for my friends. When I run them together now, my teeth are smooth, silent.

“Not that I know of.” And when I said that, I knew I was grinding — in my sleep.

With my tongue, I could feel my right side of teeth was worn smaller. My jaw is sore when I wake up.

At supper that night, my stepfather Russell said he ground his teeth, too. He’s waiting for crowns to be placed over the metal rods the oral surgeon screwed into his jaw.

“It means you’re not at peace with the Lord, Dylan,” he said. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”

He has been there. Russell never exactly explains where “there” is, but you know when he says it. You get the idea by the way he holds his head and the way his hands shake. Russell’s fingers never come completely clean, and some of them are crooked, missing nails.

My hands are clean, and I’ve never had a wife leave me or children ignore me, but we still have a lot in common. Everyone does — this isn’t a fun place.

I have gone to the Lord for solace, for a reason to sleep still. I could convince myself that all God wants for me is peace. But the quicker that I — that all of us — realize this is simply not true, the better off we’ll be.

It occurs to me that though Jesus spoke of peace, he carried a tremendous burden. I’ve also studied the code of the West and learned that a hero always carries his burden in silence. Shane rode wounded into the sunset. Jesus sweated blood in garden.

I grind my teeth in the night. I guess some people drink too much. Some gamble, some have sex or eat. We go to the mall and buy things for ourselves. Some pray to God for absolution and release. Some of us deny ourselves most things.

I’m no Shane and I’m certainly no Jesus, but like Russell, like the rest of us, I am restless — I’m burdened. Most times in my life I have been good at keeping quiet about it. And for good reason: my case is no worse than the next. But then the noise we don’t grant ourselves in our waking hours seeps out in drunkenness, mania, or sleep.

Getting better started with someone saying something. The blond in blue scrubs asking the question that no one else could know to ask. And then Russell calling it the only thing he knew how.

A peace exists whether you call it the Lord or the grace of humanity. The peace begins with connection, a stranger asking what it is you do at night or a family member saying exactly how he sees it. The Lord doesn’t want us to be at peace all the time. We wouldn’t have any reason to seek him out, to look to one another, and then to finally and just for a moment find it.