The Watchman and the Wall

She built it herself and everybody says so, and she has stopped enjoying hearing it.

Nine years. A room above a shop, then the shop, then two people, then five. It is a good thing. It employs people who needed employing and it does something worth doing and she is proud of it in the way you are proud of a child, which is to say permanently and slightly anxiously.

And she has not slept properly since the fourth year.

Not insomnia exactly. She goes to sleep fine. She wakes at about two and lies there with her eyes open running the same circuit: the lease, the woman on Thursdays who has been off a lot, the invoice that has not been paid, the thing she said to a supplier that she should have said differently. And by twenty past three she has usually got up and looked at her phone, which never once helps and which she does anyway.

Ask her why she does not put it down and she will say something entirely reasonable. If I do not watch it, nobody does.

And she believes that. That is the thing. It is not a complaint about her staff; she likes her staff. It is a settled conviction, arrived at somewhere in the fourth year, that the thing she made is standing because she is holding it, and that the night is when the holding has to be done alone.

The psalm is written to somebody exactly like you

Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep (Psalm 127:1 and 2).

Read who it is addressed to. Not to lazy people. To builders. To people who rise early and sit up late, which is the exact profile of a woman who wakes at two and gets up at twenty past three.

And notice that it does not tell them to stop building. It tells them who is keeping the city.

Building and keeping are two different jobs, and you have been doing both, and only one of them was ever assigned to you.

You have been carrying a night shift that was never yours. The word says except the LORD keep the city the watchman wakes in vain, and vain there does not mean wicked, it means it does not achieve the thing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that difference land on a woman lying awake rather than making her feel scolded at two in the morning.

The bread of sorrows

That phrase in verse two is worth stopping on, because it is a picture and pictures get past a tired mind better than arguments.

Eating the bread of sorrows is a way of describing a person consuming anxiety as though it were food. Taking it in, night after night, because it is what is on the table at that hour, and getting no nourishment from it at all.

You have eaten a great deal of that bread since the fourth year, and it has not once made the lease safer or the invoice paid.

You have been fed something at two in the morning that has never once nourished you. Scripture names it exactly and then says He gives His beloved sleep, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to lie still, because Scripture calls Him the Comforter and that word is about presence rather than about advice.

Keeping is His verb and it has always been His verb

Go through the psalms and watch who does the keeping. He that keeps you will not slumber. The LORD is your keeper. He shall preserve your going out and your coming in.

Every time, God is the subject of that verb. Not once is a person told to keep their own city as the ultimate line of defense, and the reason is not that human effort is bad. It is that a human being has to sleep, and a city that is only safe while one particular woman is conscious is not actually safe at all.

You are able to lie down because someone else is awake. The word says He who keeps you does not slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line like that and turns it into an actual releasing of a grip in an actual bed.

And I will not oversell it, because you would see straight through that. Nothing here promises the lease renews or the invoice comes in or the woman on Thursdays comes back. What is guaranteed is not the business. It is the Keeper, and a woman who knows the wall is manned lies down differently from a woman who thinks she is the only one on it.