The Building That Does Not Know I Am In It

Six floors, four staircases, and a route he could walk with his eyes shut, which he never does, because that is the whole point of him.

Ten at night until six in the morning. Four full walks and the odd extra when something makes a noise that turns out to be the heating.

The building is enormous and completely empty and he is the only warm thing in it. On the third floor there is a plant somebody waters that has outlived two of the people who used to water it. On the fifth there is a photograph on a desk of a girl in a swimming cap, and he has never met her father and he knows that face better than most of his own family's.

Nine years of nights.

And here is what he has never said to anybody, because it sounds like the sort of thing that would worry his wife.

Sometimes, at about four, on the long straight corridor on the fourth floor, the emptiness stops feeling like a building and starts feeling like a verdict. He is awake, keeping watch over rooms that do not know he exists, for people who will come in at eight and never think about the night at all.

Nobody knows I am in here.

That is your fourth floor. That is your four in the morning. And I want to reach you on that corridor, because there is a psalm about somebody else who is awake, and it changes who is in the building.

Somebody else is awake

There is a psalm for people traveling at night, and its central claim is about sleep.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

It says it twice, which is how Hebrew leans on a thing. Will not slumber. Shall neither slumber nor sleep.

Every other watchman in the world eventually sleeps. That is the limit of every human watch: a man can keep a building for eight hours and then he must go home and stop. The psalm is saying that there is one watch that never has a gap in it.

You are not the only one awake in that building. Not at four, not on the fourth floor, not on the long straight corridor. The written word puts a keeper in the night who does not close His eyes, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man with a torch rather than leaving it as a verse for travelers.

Now let me say something about your trade that I think you already half know.

You are doing a thing God describes Himself doing. Not metaphorically. Keeping watch over what is asleep and cannot keep itself is the exact image the psalm reaches for when it wants to say what God is like, and it is the literal content of your job description.

That is a strange dignity to be walking around with at four in the morning, and nobody has ever put it in front of you.

You are doing something that resembles Him. He that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the word for keeping is the word for a watchman on a wall. The Holy Spirit has been on that corridor for nine years, keeping the keeper.

And here is what I want to say about nobody knows I am in here, because it is true and it is also the smaller half of the sentence.

Nobody in the daytime knows. That is accurate. But the building being unaware of you is not the same as you being unaccompanied in it, and those two have been running together in your head at four in the morning for nine years.

You have had company on every walk. The written word makes the keeping continuous precisely so that there is no hour in which somebody is watching alone. The Holy Spirit does not go off at ten and come back at six.