Psalm 121:3-4: Somebody Says It Over You

He will not let your foot slip— he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

Psalm 121:3-4 (NIV)

Somebody Says It Over You

Grip tape on the bus steps wears down to bare metal by midwinter, and the driver replaces it herself with a roll she keeps under her seat. Nobody has fallen on that step yet.

Somebody in this song looks up at the hills and asks where any help is going to come from, and then he answers himself: his help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. After that the words turn. I have always heard a second voice come in there, and everything from that point is turned toward the first man instead of coming from him: your foot, your right hand, your life, your coming and your going. It sounds like a blessing one traveler says to another, and it is the kind of sentence a person cannot quite get said to himself.

The answer does not stay small. It goes for the largest case there is. The one watching over you is the same one who has watched over Israel and will neither slumber nor sleep. A promise about one foot on one road takes its weight from a watch kept over a whole people, in the open, across generations, with the record left where it could be checked. The watching is one watching, and it does not thin out on its way down to a single man on a single night.

The only sleep anywhere in these two lines belongs to the one keeping watch, and he has no use for it. A man lying awake can say that to himself and hear how thin it comes out. The foot that does not slip is still the foot doing the walking, on ground that stays rough, and the word about that ground has to reach him from somewhere outside his own head.

Whoever first said these words over a traveler had to lie down and sleep that night himself. He said them anyway.