God Doesn’t Keep Business Hours
I am, without a doubt, one of the world's worst sleepers. Between chronic pain that tends to flare at 2 a.m. and a brain that never stops planning, plotting, and organizing, sleep and I have a complicated relationship. Most nights, I lie there staring at the ceiling fan, doing math I have no business doing (If I fall asleep in the next four minutes, I'll get five hours and thirty-seven minutes...), eventually giving up and talking to the Lord instead (which is what I should have been doing all along).
One particular night, after tossing, turning, and rearranging my pillows about eleven times, I finally whispered, "Lord, I know You're up. Will you keep me company until I fall asleep?" That's when it hit me. He wasn't just "up" because I happened to be awake and stressed. He is always up. He has never once, not for a single second since the beginning of time, closed His eyes. My insomnia is occasional. His wakefulness is eternal.
I started thinking about everything that happens while I'm asleep, or trying to be. My heart keeps beating. My lungs keep working. The sun keeps orbiting toward morning on schedule, whether I'm conscious to appreciate it or not. And somewhere on the other side of the planet, another believer is waking up to a brand-new set of problems, and the Lord is every bit as alert to them as He is to me. He doesn't get tired. He doesn't need a nap. He doesn't hit snooze on my prayer requests because He stayed up too late the night before. He is fully, perpetually, gloriously awake and aware.
The psalmist put it beautifully: "Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4).
I love that the verse just before it says the Lord "will not suffer thy foot to be moved." He's not dozing in a rocking chair while we stumble around in the dark. He's watching our feet. He sees the loose gravel before we step on it and the wobble in our knees before we feel it. That's not passive, half-asleep care. That's an actively engaged, eyes-wide-open, never-distracted kind of love.
Here's where this gets really good for those of us who struggle with anxiety (raises hand, sheepishly). If God never sleeps, there is never a moment, day or night, when your situation catches Him off guard. He isn't scrambling to catch up on what happened while He was "away." There is no away. He was watching when the diagnosis came in. He was awake when the phone rang with bad news at midnight. He was fully alert when you couldn't stop the tears at 3 a.m. and felt like nobody in the world understood. Somebody did. He always does.
I think we sometimes picture God like a customer service line, available during "business hours." and if our crisis falls outside of those hours, we'll just have to leave a message and wait for a callback. But that is not the God of the Bible. Psalm 121 doesn't say He keeps regular hours. It says He never slumbers, never sleeps, not even for a quick catnap. There is no time zone where God is off duty. There is no hour of your life, past, present, or future, when He wasn't already there, wide awake, fully aware, and completely in control.
I love that this same idea shows up in Isaiah, when the prophet reminds us that "the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary" (Isaiah 40:28). Fainteth not. He doesn't run out of steam halfway through your hardest season and need to sit one out. And, as someone who knows exactly what it's like to run out of steam long before I run out of obligations, I take great comfort in this characteristic of my God. The God who flung the stars into space and is still holding them there tonight has more than enough strength left over to hold us, too.
So, the next time you find yourself wide awake at some ridiculous hour, staring at the ceiling and rehashing every worry you own, remember you're not alone in that quiet room. The God who never sleeps is right there with you, fully aware of exactly what's keeping you up, and fully capable of handling every bit of it. You can finally close your eyes, because He never has to close His.
🔍 PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN: A Peek at the Study Behind This Post
It actually started with a very unspiritual complaint muttered out loud at 2 a.m.: "Lord, I know You're up." That offhand line is what sent me digging.
I immediately thought of Psalm 121:4, which I learned as a young girl in Sunday School.
I read the whole psalm slowly instead of yanking the verse out alone, and I noticed verse 3 right before it, "he will not suffer thy foot to be moved," pairs with verse 4. That pairing (feet plus sleeplessness) is what gave me the "watching our feet in the dark" picture.
I checked a couple of commentaries (BibleRef and a Hebrew word study on "keepeth," shamar, which means to guard or watch over closely) to make sure I wasn't overreading the verse. Shamar showing up back in Genesis 2:15 for Adam tending the garden was a fun rabbit trail that didn't make the final cut, but it deepened my sense that God's "keeping" is active, hands-on care, not passive presence.
I wanted a second witness verse so I wasn't leaning on just one passage, so I searched "God does not grow weary" and landed on Isaiah 40:28, "fainteth not, neither is weary." That word "fainteth" sealed the connection between never sleeping and never running out of strength.
Once I had Psalm 121 and Isaiah 40 side by side, the devotion basically wrote itself: sleepless me, sleepless God, but for very different reasons, and that contrast became the whole point.
From start to finish, this one took about forty-five minutes, most of which I spent sitting with that one muttered sentence before I even opened a Bible. Sometimes the study takes longer than the writing!
If you've ever said something offhand to God and wondered later if it was actually true, chase it down. Grab a concordance app, look up the key word, read the whole chapter around your verse instead of just the verse itself, and see where it leads. You might be surprised what treasure is sitting right there in a sentence you almost dismissed.