Fourteen Months of Keeping Watch

Marcia has become the family's caseworker and nobody appointed her.

It started because she is the one who is good with forms. That is the whole of the reason. Fourteen months ago there was a letter, and somebody had to go through it properly, and Marcia went through it properly, and by the fourth week she had a folder with dividers in it.

Now she has three folders.

She has a spreadsheet of every date. She knows the name of every person who has ever replied, and the names of four who have not. She knows exactly which reference letters went in, which one had to be redone because of a formatting requirement nobody had mentioned, and which week the whole thing sat with somebody who was on leave.

She rings on Tuesdays because she worked out in month three that Tuesdays get answered.

And it has been fourteen months, and there is no decision, and there is no date for a decision, and there is no way to ask when there might be one.

Her sister is the one it is about. And her sister, who is not a passive woman either, said something to her in the kitchen in the spring that Marcia has not been able to put down.

She said, "Marcia. How much sleep have you had since this started?"

Marcia said she was fine.

"That is not what I asked."

And Marcia said something about the Tuesdays and about a thing she needed to chase, and her sister let her finish, and then said:

"Fourteen months. And every single hour you have been awake for it, has it taken one day off the wait?"

Marcia did not answer that.

Then their aunt, who had been in the doorway longer than either of them realized, said the thing that actually went in.

She said, "Baby, let me ask you something else. Before any of this. All those years you were sleeping soundly and knew nothing about any letter. Who was keeping watch then?"

Now let me ask you what you have been sitting up with.

There is something. A case, a claim, a diagnosis, a young person's next three years, a decision being made in a building you cannot enter by people who will never know your name. And you have made yourself the night watch over it.

Somebody is already on duty

Psalm 121 is a song for people walking a road, and it makes one claim four times because the psalmist clearly knew that nobody believes it the first time.

He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3 to 4

He who keeps you will not slumber. And then again, immediately, with a behold in front of it, because he is going to say it twice in one breath.

Will neither slumber nor sleep. Two words for the same thing, which is Hebrew for: not dozing, not resting, not in any sense off duty.

Now hold that against a woman with three folders.

There is a watch being kept over your sister, and it has been kept for fourteen months, and it was being kept for the whole of the thirty-odd years before that when nobody in your family had heard of any of this. It did not begin when you started your spreadsheet.

So hear this said over you, at the kitchen table with the folders open. You are not the night watch, and the hours you have spent awake have not shortened the wait by one day, and none of that means you love her less than you thought. That is written down and repeated inside a single verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise about somebody not sleeping and lets a person actually go to bed, which is a different work from agreeing that they should.

Now let me guard this, because this doctrine gets used to tell people to stop fighting for their families and I will not do that here.

Keep the folders.

Ring on Tuesdays, because you worked out that Tuesdays get answered and that is genuinely useful information that nobody gave you. Chase the letter. Get the reference redone. Scripture is full of people who worked every lever within reach: Nehemiah surveyed a wall by night before he asked anybody for anything, and he prayed the whole time.

What comes off is the watch, not the work.

They are different and they have got welded together, and the weld is why you are so tired. The work happens on Tuesdays between nine and five. The watch happens at two in the morning, and produces nothing, and has never once been requested by anybody, including your sister, who would give a great deal to have you back.

And here is the part your aunt was actually asking about, and it is the whole message.

You slept for thirty years.

Soundly, most nights, knowing nothing about letters or dividers or formatting requirements. And through every one of those nights, somebody was keeping your family who was not you.

Nothing about that has changed. The only thing that has changed is that you now know there is something to worry about, and you have quietly taken over a post that was never vacant.

The written word says He who keeps you will neither slumber nor sleep, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person able to lie down on an unfinished thing, in His own time, and not because anybody told them to.

There was a movement five hundred years ago in a small, cold, poor country whose people spent generations waiting on decisions made in rooms they could not enter, by people who did not know their names. They did not stop petitioning. They petitioned constantly, at real cost. What they refused to believe was that the outcome depended on whether they were awake.