“Wakey, Wakey. Rise and Shine.”
-John Cleese
One of the most difficult places to get some rest and sleep is in a hospital. Sure, they put you there so you can rest while you recover from whatever it is you need recovering from, but obtaining any real rest is highly unlikely. Hospitals are busy places, there is a lot that needs to be done, and as a result, they are noisy despite the staff’s best efforts to be quiet. My bed was next to the door, and the door was directly across from the nurses’ station. I had already been there for five days, and while I did not know it at the time, I would be there another five. Between the sounds of machines beeping and humming, the bustle of the nurses’ station, the 24/7 delirious ranting of my roommate who refused to acknowledge that I was in the room, sleep simply wasn’t happening. Dr. Vinnie DaGoomba noticed that while my condition had stabilized, I hadn’t seemed to be getting any better. A brief conversation later, Vinnie DaGoomba prescribed a mild sedative, which did the trick. I had finally, after too many days, gotten some sleep.
There was one slight problem.
This minor sedative needed to be administered every few hours. After finally reacquainting myself with R.E.M. sleep for the first time in a long time, I was suddenly awakened by Nurse Ratched. “WAKE UP!! Its time for your sleeping pill!”
It wouldn’t be appropriate to recount the ensuing conversation, so moving right along…
A few days later I had another conversation with Dr. DaGoomba, this time it was about the lethargic drowsiness I was experiencing. He decided that it was mostly due to the prescribed sedative and so he would write a script for a mild stimulant to counter the sedative.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to recount the ensuing conversation, so again, moving right along…
A few days later, I was discharged from the hospital, and after some months of rehab and recuperation, I am now galivanting about as if nothing ever happened!
PRAISE THE LORD!
But I digress.
It’s good to be awake. It’s also good to rest, to sleep. We need both. There have been times when my job required me to be awake for way too long and I found myself chugging Red Bull to keep my eyes open. This created a condition where I found myself being Wide Awake Exhausted, followed by crashing into near unconsciousness for several days being entirely useless. Sure, I totally get that extreme situations sometimes call for extreme measures, but this is not a healthy lifestyle. A balance needs to be had.
This goes far beyond the physical, as we don’t merely exist solely in the physical alone.
So many of us are going about our day to day lives in a slumber. Walking about like Zombies with no clue to what’s really going on or who we truly are. Zombies are dead. They are totally clueless about who they are and how they got to where they are.
Holy Spirit had this to say about the matter, via the apostle:
“…For this reason, it says,
‘Awake sleeper and arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.’”
Paul, Letter to the Church at Ephesus, 5:14 (NASB)
We are not called to be the walking dead. We are to be the living sons and daughters of the living God. We are not to have the mere appearance of being awake, a place of mindless striving toward some unobtainable end, a carrot on a stick of a promise to be fulfilled in some undetermined place in the future. We are not to be merely “awake” but AWAKE! (This would not be a proper place for me to talk about “Woke”, the Fake Awake.) And we are called, commanded, to ARISE FROM THE DEAD.
What???
I thought that only Jesus raised from the dead.
No, not really, there were a bunch of folks who got over being dead.
There was the Shunammite’s son, the son of the widow at Nain, the formerly dead guy who was tossed on Elisha’s bones, Lazarus, and don’t forget the guy who was so bored by Paul’s sermon that he fell asleep and then fell out of a third story window. There are quite a few folks in scripture who used to be dead but are done being dead. One thing all these people have in common is that they were physically dead, not “mostly dead,” or “not quite dead yet,” but dead … D-E-A-D: as in, “Passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, a stiff, bereft of life, pushing up daisies, their metabolic processes are history, kicked the bucket, off the twig, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!” (OK, enough with the not-so-subtle movie and television references. You get the idea.)
The big takeaway here is that unlike these guys, we ain’t dead, and yet Christ Jesus commands us to Awake and Arise from the dead. Although we are physically alive and kicking, we aren’t really truly living. We devote much of our time simply trying to survive, either at the sustenance level, or clawing our way to pay our bills. If we happen to be lucky enough to have the resources to be free of financial concerns, we have the leisure of restlessness, the searching for things to satisfy the soul.
The command to Awake and Arise is so much more than to have a beating heart. We are to Awaken to our true identity, that we are created n the very likeness and image of God, that we are beloved sons and daughters, who “…become partakers of the divine nature…” (2 Peter 1:4). Its only as we Awaken to our real identity in Christ and Arise to our proper place, shaking off all the distractions, weariness, and burdens, that we can then find rest (Matthew 11:28-29, NASB).
Only when we are wide awake can we dream sweet dreams.
Thanks for letting me take up some of your time.