Psalm 121 has become a psalm that I have clung to for the past 18 months. My husband had somewhat recently preached this psalm and wrote about it, and one could consistently use the words keep and Keeper to translate the Hebrew root shâmar, meaning “to hedge about (as with thorns), i.e. guard; gen. to protect, attend to, etc.”1 The consistent use of the same word over and over drove an important point home to me. The LORD will keep my life.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.
Around the same time my husband preached that sermon, we were considering the possibility of a big move, which eventually did happen. Throughout this time—and even up to the very moment I type these words—my biggest concern wasn’t my own life; it was (and is) my kids’ lives.
It’s a lot easier to accept and believe that God will keep my life, but. . . my kids? Isn’t that my job? For us, our move meant changing from homeschooling our kids for 12 years to placing them in a (good) Christian school. For me personally, this meant moving from…
- Carefully handpicking every bit of curriculum to my kids using whatever is chosen by someone else for them
- Teaching them myself to others teaching my children
- Us being together as a family a lot to much of the day to my kids being with a school full of kids and some adults we don’t know
- Being aware of almost everything that was going on in my kids’ lives to being informed (maybe) of what goes on when they’re gone all day
- Choosing much of what my kids do to being told what my kids have to do
Even as I write, it’s very clear that I had a lot of control over my kids and a lot of that control has now been delegated to others. I get to see my kids a lot less than I used to. (For what it’s worth, my kids loved their time at home for the most part, and they also love and I’m thankful for a lot of what they have now at school.)
While this change has been very difficult for me, I have to repeatedly, almost daily remind myself that it is the LORD who keeps my kids, not me. Of course, God uses me as a mother to teach and train them. Deuteronomy 6 makes it clear that parents are to teach their children to love God when they get up, when they go about their day, when they go to bed. I try to make the most of these moments that we do have together to teach them, especially in light of all the new experiences, people, and trials that they face.
Beyond this, I must simply trust that the LORD will keep them as he keeps me. The reality is that he has always been keeping them. My opportunities (which were providentially given to me) to control more of their lives when homeschooling perhaps deluded me into thinking that I was their primary keeper. Perhaps in peeling my fingers from every aspect of their lives God is being my Keeper as he teaches me that he is their Keeper as well.
So who exactly is the One who keeps me, my husband, and my children?
He is the One who created the heaven and earth. . . by just His words. He is powerful.
He is the One who never sleeps. When I sleep he watches over me. When I sleep, He watches over my kids too. I can’t do that. When I’m at home and my kids are at school, He watches over them.
He is our Protector. All the bad things that can happen during the day or the night—he is powerful and able to protect them. He knows what my kids hear, what they see, how they hurt, how they struggle, how they’re tempted, and he is able to protect them.
He is Eternal. He can keep them now, and he can keep them forever. I will not be there forever, but God will.
Trusting God to be your children’s Keeper is hard. I’ve memorized Psalm 121. I searched the internet for wall art to put in my dining room as a constant reminder (I couldn’t find one I wanted, so I made my own!) I pray this psalm over my kids. I still struggle, but God is using this struggle to force me to trust him. I still sorrow, but God is teaching me to seek Him for my joy.
What the Lord expects from us at such seasons is not to abandon ourselves to unreasoning sorrow, but trustingly to look sorrow in the face, to scan its features, to search for the help and hope, which, as surely as God is our Father, must be there. In such trials there can be no comfort for us so long as we stand outside weeping. If only we will take the courage to fix our gaze deliberately upon the stern countenance of grief, and enter unafraid into the darkest recesses of our trouble, we shall find the terror gone, because the Lord has been there before us, and, coming out again, has left the place transfigured, making of it by the grace of his resurrection a house of life, the very gate of heaven.2
My children have a far greater Keeper than me. The best thing I can do for them is point them to their Keeper. Instead of trying to keep control of them, I must relinquish them to the One who perfectly keeps them from this time forth and forevermore.
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Holly Huffstutler serves with her husband David, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy in Troy, MI. She has a master’s degree in Biblical Ministries and blogs with him here where this post first appeared. Holly is a homemaker, raising and putting her four children through school.
Image by Ralf Ruppert from Pixabay
- James Strong, in A Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament and The Hebrew Bible (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2009) 118. [↩]
- Vos, Geerhardus. Rabboni. https://kerux.com/doc/0702A1.html. [↩]
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