With my ice grips attached to my boots, I pick my way gingerly across three lanes of frozen slush on a deserted Oak Street, downtown, toward First Christian Church. It’s nearly ten p.m. on a Saturday night, and no one is out on the streets tonight.

No one except people seeking shelter against the bitter cold.

I make my way to the entrance of the warming center, in the basement, around the back of the church.

A dozen people huddle in the stairwell leading down to the basement. They wait with endless patience.

A woman bundled thick against the cold, with a safety vest, and clipboard in hand, calls out with authority, “Step to the right. Volunteer coming through. Step to the right.”

The huddled group moves as a body to the right of the stairwell. Volunteer makes her way quickly down the stairs and into the warmth in the intake area.

I am ushered to the Volunteer Room, also known as the Bag and Backpack Room, where guests’ belongings are stored overnight. Each item tagged, neatly shelved, all in numerical order. At the Volunteer check-in table I write my name, my phone number, and my login time.

“You can make a nametag,” a fellow worker says, pointing to a fat marker and a roll of masking tape.

I take the marker and write “Maria” on a short strip of masking tape. I put the makeshift nametag on my jacket, and slip into “street name” mode.

“Do you want to do guest intake tonight?” Dave the shift leader asks. “Or do overnight de-escalation if a situation gets tense?”

“I am really good at keeping night watch,” I say. “I’ll just sit in the sleeping room and be a keeper of the peace for the guests.”

The team breaks into a spontaneous little joy dance, because no one wants to sit for seven or eight hours, watching people sleep.

I fetch my water bottle, my thermos of coffee, my bag of trail mix, my folder of work projects, and the half of my well-worn Shorter Christian Prayer book which long ago unhinged itself from its spine.

Guests drift in and slowly settle down for the night on their mats. The lights go down, and the snoring begins. A mighty chorus, the sounds of first deep sleep. These are the sounds of the deeply exhausted.

Exhausted from lack of sleep. Exhausted from poor health. Exhausted from always having to shuffle on. Exhausted from the lack of everything I take for granted. Everything. Exhausted.

Settling in on a repurposed church bench I try to imagine the vulnerability that comes with sleeping every night in public spaces. As I keep night watch I realize that I do not know what it means to live with constant vulnerability, and the stigma that goes with not being able to protect yourself from the cruelty or desperation of strangers.

I take a peek at my phone. The screen shows 12:23 a.m. I open my Christian Prayer to a section already bookmarked: the Office for the Dead, and I turn to Evening Prayer.

I pray the Office for the Dead tonight, not because I associate homelessness with death, although I could, but because the psalms are full of supplication, and full of trust. The kind of trust Jesus clung to as his life hung vulnerable and near death.

From Psalm 130 I pray these words:

My soul is waiting for the Lord;
I count on his word.
My soul is longing for the Lord,
more than watchman for daybreak …

Daybreak. The word itself seems a herald of hope.

From my own seasons of sleepless nights I know this watching, and the hope that arises with the first light of dawn, which dispels the long dark night of anguish and stirs an unexplainable sense of possibility.

Yet for many who live under a cloud of hopelessness, the first light of dawn can also reawaken a cold dread.

I sit a while with these words of the Psalmist, and with these thoughts.

I pray a binding prayer, from the close of Night Prayer, which seems fitting, now, as I keep night watch:

Lord God,
we beg you to visit this house, … this shelter,
and banish from it all the deadly power of the enemy.

May your holy angels dwell here, … tonight, in this shelter,
to keep us in peace,
and may your blessing be upon us always.

“Keep us in peace,” I pray. Not “them” on their mats and “me” on this repurposed church bench. But us.