He Does Not Sleep

It started with her son, and it was reasonable, and it has never stopped.

Eleven years ago there was a bad stretch with him. I am not going to describe it and she would not want it described. What she did during it was pray, constantly, in a way that felt like standing at a window all night.

He came through. He is fine now; he rings on Sundays and has a job and a girl he is serious about, and there is nothing left of that stretch except in her.

Because the watch never came down.

It widened. Her daughter went onto it. Then her husband's health. Then a girl from church who is not doing well. Then, and this is the part she has never said out loud, her own soul, because at some point she began to feel that if she stopped attending to her own state something would slip in that too.

She is fifty-eight, and she is tired in a specific way. She wakes at four most nights and reviews. She cannot watch anything on television without checking her phone. Somebody described her once, admiringly, as a prayer warrior, and she smiled and something in her went cold.

And here is what she is frightened of, and it is the reason she has not stopped: she does not know what happens if she comes off the watch. Nobody else is on it. That is the arithmetic as she understands it, and it has kept her at the window for eleven years.

Somebody is already on it

The hundred and twenty-first psalm says something about sleep, and it says it twice, which in Hebrew is how you insist.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

He that keepeth thee will not slumber. And then again, wider: shall neither slumber nor sleep.

Twice. Two verbs the second time. It is written the way you would write something for a person who did not believe it the first time.

And notice what the doubling is for. It is not a poetic flourish. It is aimed at exactly the assumption you have been operating under, which is that if you sleep, nobody is watching.

The psalm answers that specific fear. Not by telling you to be less anxious. By telling you the post is occupied and has been the whole time and will be tonight when you are unconscious.

You are not the only one on this watch, and the other one does not sleep at all. That is not me easing an anxiety; Psalm 121:4 says it twice with two verbs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a woman awake at four.

What the watch became

Now let me look at what happened over eleven years, because it did not start wrong.

What you did during your son's bad stretch was right. That is what a mother does and it is what prayer is for and I am not going to reframe it as codependence or anxiety, because it was neither.

But a watch that was set for a crisis was never stood down. And a watch that is never stood down does what all of them do: it expands. It takes in more people, and then more, and eventually it takes in the watcher's own soul, and at that point a person is guarding the one thing they were never equipped to guard.

And that is the piece I most want you to hear. You put your own soul on your own list. There is nobody in Scripture anywhere who is asked to do that.

You have been standing over your own keeping, and the keeping was never yours to stand over. The written word says twice that the One keeping you does not sleep, and the Holy Spirit is not a reinforcement a woman calls on while she holds the line herself.

And the guardrail, because this is where the whole site lands: I am not going to give you a routine to replace the watch. No schedule, no practice, no better way to pray for your daughter. If a hard stretch comes for one of them, it will not be because you slept, and I will not hand you anything that could later be read as the thing you should have kept up.

You are not the reason anybody has been safe, and the next hard year will not be your slippage. Scripture puts the keeping in the hands of One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Holy Spirit has been at that window through every one of the eleven years.