He Does Not Sleep on the Keeping

She has been on watch for a fortnight and she is very tired.

Nobody put her on watch. That is worth saying at the start. What happened is that she turned about two weeks ago, and it was real and it was quiet, and then almost immediately she understood, without anybody telling her, that the holding of it would be her job.

So she has been holding it.

That means checking herself in the morning. It means a particular vigilance around certain hours of the day, because she knows which hours they are. It means a small internal alarm that goes off whenever she notices herself slipping in a direction, and a correction, and then the alarm resets. It means not really resting, because resting is when the watch is not being kept.

Fourteen days of that, and she is worn through, and the wearing has begun to look to her like evidence that she is not up to it.

I want to be careful and slow here, because the thing she is doing is not foolish. Somebody has to keep watch over a person's steps. She is not wrong that the standing matters and she is not wrong that a person can drift. Everything in her reasoning is correct except the question of whose shift it is.

And that error is not hers alone. Nobody handed her the psalm.

That is you at the end of a fortnight.

You've been keeping a watch nobody assigned you, over your own footing, without a break, for two weeks. And the tiredness is not a sign that you are failing. It is what happens to anybody who works a post that was never meant to have one shift.

The psalm gives the keeping to somebody who does not sleep

This is one of the short psalms and it is built around a single question and its answer, and the answer contains a detail that is aimed straight at a person who has not rested in two weeks.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.Psalm 121:3

He that keepeth thee.

There is a keeper in that sentence and it is not the one being kept. The psalm assigns the job, plainly, and the assignment goes to God, and the one whose foot is in question is described entirely in the passive.

You are being kept rather than keeping, and the psalm hands the post to Somebody else in the same breath as it names the danger, and I am not being soft with a psalm: Psalm 121:3 says he that keepeth thee, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my gentleness who can get a woman off a watch she has stood for fourteen days.

Now the detail, and it is the one for you specifically. Will not slumber.

Think about why that is in there. Every human watch has a gap, because every human watchman sleeps. That is not a moral failing, it is a fact about bodies, and it is the reason watches are kept in shifts and the reason a single person standing one is not a plan but an emergency.

The psalm rules the gap out. Not by asking you to try harder, but by naming a keeper for whom the gap does not exist.

You have a watch being kept without a gap in it, and the sleeplessness belongs to Him rather than being asked of you, which is written into that clause rather than into my sympathy for a worn fortnight, with the Spirit of God able to let somebody down off a post that argument could not.

And notice the first half, which is the promise your vigilance has been trying to guarantee. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. That is the very thing you have been standing there to prevent. It is stated as His undertaking, in the same verse, before the keeper is even mentioned.

So you have been guarding an outcome God had already taken responsibility for, at the cost of two weeks of sleep.

This is being kept this morning by Someone who does not need the rest you have been going without, because Scripture says he that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen early on a bright morning.