Daily Manna · Day 26 · January 26
Your Keeper
“The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand.”
It is easy to say the Lord is your keeper if you have never been the one who has to stay awake.
Picture the woman this song was sung by. She is walking up to Jerusalem for a feast, in a caravan, through hill country where the passes are known for robbers and the sun does the killing. She lifts her eyes to the hills, and the hills are not comfort. They are where the danger is. Somebody in the group starts the song, and it comes back to her as an answer: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
Keep is the verb of this psalm, six times in eight verses, and by verse 5 it has narrowed to a position. The LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. Not overhead in general. At your right hand, the side your working hand is on, the side you cannot cover while it is occupied. Shade in that country was not a comfort; it was survival. And the psalm never claims the road is safe. It claims there is somebody standing between you and what the road does.
So here is the promise, and it is narrower and better than a guarantee of an easy passage. Someone is awake on the side you cannot watch, He does not need relieving at six, and He has never once handed the shift to you.
Keeper of Israel, I have been standing watch on a side I cannot see, I am not good at it, and I have not slept properly in a while. Take the hour when I am least guarded. I am handing it to you by name before I reach it, and then I am going to sleep, which is the part I keep refusing to do. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 26 is He Humbled Thee (Deuteronomy 8:3).