The Keeper Does Not Sleep on the Keeping

The plants on that porch are in whatever came to hand, which means two coffee tins, a bucket with a hole punched in the bottom and one actual pot, and the one in the actual pot is doing the worst.

Just after six. That good hour before the heat. Radio on low inside, the door propped, and the smell of coffee coming through it.

Three of them out here. Her sister in law arrived at ten to and has not said why and does not need to.

And here is where she has got to, and she has never once said it out loud because of how it would sound.

She is tired of keeping herself awake.

Not tired of God. She wants to be plain about that, because it is not a crisis of faith and she would fight anybody who called it one. It is that somewhere along the way the whole thing became a maintenance job. Stay soft. Stay attentive. Notice things. Do not go flat. And she has been running that job for years now and it is heavy and she has never been able to put it down long enough to look at it.

And in the last month she has begun to conclude she is simply bad at it, which is the thought under the tiredness and the one that keeps her up.

Sit down, sister. Take the chair with the arm. Because there is a psalm about keeping and it settles whose job it is in about four lines.

Six times, and every one is Him

Psalm 121 is short. It is the one people quote about lifting up eyes to the hills. And the word keep appears in it six times in eight verses, which for a psalm that short is deliberate.

Read two of them.

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

He that keepeth thee. Not you keeping yourself with His help. He is the keeper. The word is used of somebody whose actual job it is, a watchman on a wall, a man over a vineyard.

Will not slumber. And then the psalm says it twice, in two different ways, because it wants the point absolutely settled: this keeper does not doze off, does not have an off shift, does not need somebody to cover for Him.

Which means there has been a watchman on the wall for the entire stretch you have been exhausting yourself standing on it.

You are kept by Somebody whose actual job it is, and that psalm says six times over that the keeping is His. That is not a way of excusing a tired woman from her responsibilities; Psalm 121:3 uses the word keeper of God and then says twice that He does not sleep, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm sung by people walking up to a festival and lays it on a porch just after six with the coffee coming through the door. The post you have been standing at was already staffed.

Now the conclusion you have come to, and I want to be very direct about it.

You have decided you are bad at this. And I want you to see what you are comparing yourself against, which is a standard nobody ever set.

There is no verse that requires a person to maintain their own spiritual alertness. Not one. There is a great deal about God keeping people, and quite a lot about people paying attention, and nothing anywhere that hands a woman the job of staying soft indefinitely by her own effort.

You have been failing at a task that was never issued.

You are not bad at a job, because the job was never issued to you and there is no verse anywhere that hands it over. Psalm 127:1 says except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than an insult, because a watchman waking in vain is exactly what you have been doing.

What is actually asked of a person

One more thing, because I do not want to leave you with nothing to do, and there is something.

The psalm does give the traveler something. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. That is the first line and it is the only action in the whole psalm performed by a human being.

Lifting eyes. That is it. Everything else in those eight verses is God keeping, God preserving, God being a shade, God not sleeping.

So the whole participation available to you is roughly the effort of looking up. It is not nothing, but it is nothing like the load you have been carrying, and it does not have to be sustained through the night by anybody.

You have one small action available and the rest of that psalm is His, and lifting eyes was never meant to be a night shift. Psalm 121:1 gives the lifting and Psalm 121:8 gives Him the going out and the coming in, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps the ratio in that psalm intact in a person rather than letting it drift back onto them.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works on a porch just after six.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how well you have maintained your own attentiveness. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.