The Rooftop Watch Over St. Paul's

On the night of December 29, 1940, German bombers dropped thousands of incendiary devices across London in what became known as the Second Great Fire of London. Flames consumed block after block around St. Paul's Cathedral. But the cathedral survived — not by luck, but because of the St. Paul's Watch.

Months earlier, architect Walter Godfrey Allen had organized a volunteer brigade of ordinary men and women who took shifts on the cathedral roof every single night. They were librarians, accountants, teachers — people who climbed stone staircases in the dark, stationed themselves among the dome and parapets, and waited. Most nights, nothing happened. They stood in the cold, watched the sky, and went home at dawn. But they came back the next night, and the next.

When the firebombs finally rained down that December evening, the watchers were already in position. They smothered thirty incendiary bombs with sand before the flames could take hold. One volunteer later wrote, "We did not know which night would be the night. So every night had to be the night."

Jesus tells His disciples the same truth in Mark 13. The master of the house will return — at evening, midnight, cockcrow, or dawn. No one knows the hour. And so the command is breathtakingly simple: stay awake. Not because vigilance is glamorous, but because faithfulness means being found ready on whichever night turns out to be the night.