He Does Not Sleep The Way You Do

Two in the morning and she is doing the roll call again. It goes in order. That is the worst part, because it means some department of her has organized it and filed it and keeps it ready.

Rachel, who went quiet after the second baby and never came back. The whole crowd from the old job, who apparently still get together, which she knows because of one photograph she should not have looked at twice and has now looked at eleven times. Anna, and the wrong thing she said to Anna in 2019, which has been replayed so often it has worn smooth, like a step. The girl from college whose last name is gone and whose laugh she could pick out of a crowded room tomorrow.

And underneath the whole list, one sentence, and it is not really about any of them. Even if I found people, I would lose them the same way I lost everybody else.

You know how it goes. You lie very still so as not to wake anyone, doing arithmetic on your own character in the dark. It does not resolve. It gets to the bottom of the list and starts again at the top, and at some point the light comes up gray around the edge of the blinds and you get up and make coffee and go to work.

Somebody is on that watch already

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:4

Notice who is being kept in that line. Not a person. A people. The psalm does not say he that keepeth you as an individual; it says he that keepeth Israel, the whole gathered lot of them, spread across a country and a diaspora and about forty different problems, and it says the one doing that keeping never once closes His eyes.

Now notice what you have been doing at two in the morning. You have been keeping. Reviewing the whole roster, checking who has drifted, tallying what went wrong and where, holding the losses in your head as though holding them is what stops there being more of them.

That is a night watch. You have been standing a night watch over a people you cannot see, without being asked, for years, unpaid, and you have never once been relieved at the end of a shift.

You are not the one holding this together, and you were never appointed to. You were promised this in writing, at Psalm 121:4, and His Spirit has been on that watch every single night you thought you were the only one on it.

There is a moment in any place that runs around the clock where one person hands over to the next. They say the names out loud. They say what happened, and what to watch, and then the first one puts on her coat and goes home, and the extraordinary thing is that she stops thinking about it in the parking lot. Not because she stopped caring. Because somebody who is awake has it.

You have a handover available to you tonight, and the person taking it does not get tired at four. That is not sentiment. Psalm 121:4, in writing, with the Holy Spirit underneath it, and He is what turns the information into sleep.

What is actually settled here

Be careful with what this promises, because a great deal of harm gets done at exactly this point by people meaning well.

Psalm 121:4 does not say that Rachel will call. It does not say the crowd from the old job will remember you, or that a new set of friends is being assembled somewhere for delivery in the spring. Nobody here is going to tell you that, because nobody here knows it, and a promise nobody can keep is a cruelty dressed up as comfort.

What it says is that the keeping of God's people is in the hands of someone who does not sleep, and that you are among the people being kept. That is smaller than the thing you wanted and it is much larger than the thing you were afraid of.

You are one of the kept, and the keeping does not run on your ability to hold anything. His word put that work in His own hands and meant it always, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed it back.

And look at what happens to the sentence underneath the roll call when you put it beside that. Even if I found people, I would lose them the same way. Set against Psalm 121:4, that sentence is not a prophecy. It is a woman doing a job that was already taken, and grading herself on it, at two in the morning, with no information.

It is already settled that God keeps His people, and your track record was never part of the arrangement. Somebody wrote that down under the Holy Spirit's own hand, and it is at Psalm 121:4, and His Spirit is the evidence of it living in you right now.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being on duty for something you cannot actually affect. Anybody who has sat up with a sick child knows it, and so does anybody who has lain awake over a decision that is being made in another city by other people. The tiredness is not proportional to the work. It is proportional to the watching. And watching a list of names you cannot call, in a room where nothing can be done at that hour, is the purest form of it there is.

You are not being asked to stop caring about any of those names. Caring is not the problem, and it was never the reason you cannot sleep. The reason you cannot sleep is that you are holding a rope somebody else is already holding, and your arms have been aching for years.