Daily Manna · Day 343 · December 9
The Keeper Who Never Sleeps
“He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.”
The objection is not academic and it should not be brushed aside: people who sang this psalm still broke their legs. Pilgrims on that road were robbed. Believers get sunstroke, and cancer, and worse, and a verse that appears to promise otherwise does real damage to somebody at a funeral.
So be exact about what the psalm claims. It does not say the road is smooth. It does not say you will not be hurt; it says he will not suffer thy foot to be moved, which in the Hebrew is about slipping, losing your footing, the thing that ends a journey on a mountain track at night. It does not promise you will not be tired. It does not even promise the sun will not be hot; the sun shall not smite thee by day is a travelling formula, and the whole psalm reads like one, because it is: a song of ascents, sung on the climb, ending on thy going out and thy coming in. It is a blessing for a journey, not an insurance policy on a body.
And notice where the psalm finally puts the weight. He shall preserve thy soul. That is the guarded thing. The rest is the road.
What it does say, flatly and twice for anyone not listening, is that the one watching does not sleep. Human guards work shifts, and the gap between shifts is where things happen. There is no second shift here, because there is no need of one.
So since you are awake anyway, use the hour rather than spending it. Hand him one item off the list instead of running the list a fourth time, then put the phone face down and go back to sleep on purpose. Sleeping is something you can afford. Somebody else is on watch, and has been all week.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 343 is Brass on a Pole (Numbers 21:9).