The Parent Who Never Sleeps

When Maria Sandoval's youngest son came down with croup in the middle of February, she did what parents have always done — she stopped sleeping. He was eighteen months old, and every few hours she would slip into his room in the dark, press her palm to his forehead, watch the rise and fall of his chest, and whisper something between a prayer and a promise that she was still there. By morning she was running on nothing. But she hadn't missed a single breath.

That's the image hiding in the original Hebrew of Psalm 121. The word shamar — "keep" or "watch over" — appears six times in eight short verses, as if the psalmist simply couldn't say it enough. The Lord keeps you. He watches your coming and your going. He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

The psalm was almost certainly a pilgrim song, sung on the road to Jerusalem — exposed miles, real danger, the kind of journey where your life depended on someone keeping watch through the night. Lifting your eyes to the mountains wasn't a moment of scenic appreciation. It was scanning the ridgelines for where trouble might come from. And the answer the psalmist gives is breathtaking in its confidence: my help comes from the One who made the mountains themselves.

Maria eventually slept. She had to. But the God of Psalm 121 never grows weary, never loses focus, never steps away from the monitor. Whatever road you're walking this week, you are not walking it unobserved. The One who made heaven and earth is watching over your coming and your going — now and forevermore.