He Does Not Sleep on the Keeping

The forecast said minus two and he has eleven acres of it just come through, and so he is awake.

He is not doing anything. That is the part that would make you laugh if it were not so familiar. There is nothing a man can do about a frost at half past three in the morning except be awake for it, and so he is awake for it, on his back, with the window open a crack because he likes to be able to hear the weather.

He has done this his whole life. His father did it. He has never once questioned it, and if you told him it was optional he would look at you the way a farmer looks at a man from the town.

But a woman at church said something to him in the spring that has stuck in him like a splinter, and she was not even talking to him, she was talking to somebody else and he overheard it.

She said: he keeps the whole night, so you only have to keep your bit of it.

He has thought about that sentence maybe forty times since March. Mostly at half past three, on his back, listening to the weather.

Because he does not keep his bit of it. He keeps all of it. And it has never occurred to him, in fifty-eight years, that anybody else was on.

The psalm says it three times because once was not going to be enough

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. The LORD is thy keeper (Psalm 121:3 to 5).

Look at how many times it says it. Will not slumber. Shall neither slumber nor sleep. And then, flatly, the LORD is thy keeper.

Nobody writes like that unless they know the person reading it will need telling more than once. That is a psalm written for men on their backs at half past three, and the writer knew perfectly well that a tired man does not take a thing in the first time.

You have somebody on the wall who has never once come off it. The word says it three times in three lines and it uses the plainest words it has, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written line into an actual quietness in a man with the window open a crack.

Your bit of it

Now let me say something about what is yours, because I am not going to insult you by telling a working man not to work.

You have a bit of it. The covers went on or they did not. The gate is shut or it is not. The thing you can do in daylight is yours to do and God has never once done a man's daytime job for him, and He does not intend to start.

Your bit is real and it is yours and it ends somewhere.

The half past three part is not your bit. Nothing you do at half past three changes a single degree of temperature. Lying awake for a frost is not stewardship; it is a man standing a watch that is already staffed, and the reason he stands it is that nobody ever told him the other fellow was up.

You have a job that ends at dark and a Keeper who does not. Scripture says He gives His beloved sleep and says it directly to men who rise early and sit up late (Psalm 127:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to actually take that, because sleeping through a frost is a matter of trust and not of tiredness.

Kept is not the same as spared

Here is where I will be straight with you, because you would smell it a mile off otherwise.

Nothing in this psalm says the frost misses your field. It does not say a keeper prevents the weather. You have farmed long enough to have lost things while praying, and so has every man who ever worked ground, and I am not going to stand here and tell you it goes differently now.

What it says is that you are kept. That the one who keeps you does not sleep. That your going out and your coming in are both His.

You are kept whether or not the eleven acres are. The written word puts the promise on the keeper and not on the harvest, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a floor under a man rather than a disappointment, because Scripture calls Him the Comforter and that is exactly the work.

And that is the honest version of it, and it is the one that lasts. A man who has been told the frost will miss him loses his faith the first year it does not. A man who knows he is kept walks out at first light either way.