Psalm 3: Peaceful Sleep

OT: Psalms 1-41 (Book 1)
NT: Philippians 4:6-7

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Psalm 3: O LORD, how many are my foes! / How many rise up against me! / Many are saying of me, “God will not deliver him.” Selah / But you are a shield around me, O LORD / you bestow glory on me and lift up my head. / To the LORD I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy hill. Selah / I lie down and sleep / I wake again, because the LORD sustains me. / I will not fear the tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side.

There's something very unsettling about the darkness. It surrounds me like a blanket around the time I go home from work, and it blinds my vision to the world around me like blinders on a horse. It makes me drive my car with caution and walk my street with uneasiness. The darkness is just plain scary to me. What is even more unsettling is the fact that the darkness covers many ungodly deeds -- crimes and deceptions among them -- deeds that may threaten to affect you or me. I cannot see what happens outside my little light field. My porch light can only shine so far. And when I go to sleep, I am vulnerable to those deeds of darkness in a new way -- for I cannot prevent them nor stop them once they happen.

So I pray for safety for not only myself but also my loved ones. That the dawn may bring me news that we all made it through the night in safety. And we usually do. Because the Lord sustains us. I wake every morning after a night of sleep knowing that the sovereign Lord was protecting me that night. That He, as it says in Psalm 122, "never sleeps nor slumbers." He is always on guard. So I can sleep peacefully at night because God is my High Protector. And I don't have to fear the darkness and the tens of thousands of potential threats it brings each night because the Lord is watching me. There is a nighttime prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that I love to repeat at night right before I go to sleep. It goes, "Guide me waking and guard me sleeping / that awake I may watch with Christ and at night I may rest in peace."

Be God's.

P.S. -- My wonderful girlfriend took this photo of one of her felines, Oliver, tonight. Fits the topic well, doesn't it?