“Let me respectfully
remind you, life and death, are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is
lost. Each of us should strive to
awaken. Awaken! Take heed. Do not squander your life.” --The Evening Gatha, Zen Buddhism
What will it take to wake you up?
To oversleep and then miss an important engagement or
appointment is one of my biggest fears. I’ve
got a big sermon to preach in the morning or an extra early flight or a
pre-sunrise commitment. Then I just can’t
risk snoozing through. Some folks are
blessed with an internal alarm clock which wakes them up, no worries. They
somehow program a wake up time into their subconscious before sleep and then miraculously
they wake right up on time.
Not me. I sleep like the dead, like a rock, like a dead rock.
I need a wake up call, a clanging bell, an annoying buzzer, an aural kick in
the pants to get me up and out the door.
To just wake me up. This often means
setting not one but two alarm clocks—one next to the bed and the other on the
farthest side of the room—whenever I really need to wake up. Otherwise? Well, I might just sleep through.
To wake right up or to snooze away, and not just in bed but
in life too. Sometimes we all need a
spiritual wake up call. These are the sharply realized moments, the starkly
clear seconds, the haunting “A Ha!” revelations when life slows down, suddenly
clarifies for us what really matters.
Whom we love. What is finally
important. What we cherish. How life is such a fragile and tender gift
from our Creator.
And so the doctor gives us the news and our spirits soar or
sink. The phone rings at 3 a.m. and we dread
answering it. We watch through tear-filled
eyes our child on his wedding day and our hearts burst with gratitude. We
narrowly escape a car accident and as our ticker thumps away, we thank God we
are o.k. We sit in church and mourn a
loved one and weep at all the things the departed will now never, ever get to
do. We hold our newborn for the first
time and she awakens in us the amazing mystery of existence.
We wake up.
Or we just continue to spiritually sleep, oversleep even,
ZZZZZ away as life passes us by in all its wonder and beauty. Then we imagine it is our work that really matters
the most and so we lose time with loved ones for that oh so crucial deal or
that cell phone call we just have to answer. We live for the drama of life, get mired
in the petty, the meaningless, the fleeting, the trivial, the need to always be
right. We waste time immersed in
technology, texting away, surfing along in a virtual world while the real world
unfolds right before us and we fail to see it.
We mistake wealth and money for meaning, hold on to our treasure and
stuff so tightly that we convince ourselves we can really take it all with us
and cram it into the coffin. We sleepwalk through life. And then we get a wake up call.
Or we wake up, no call necessary. Wake up and decide to take this one day,
freely and generously been given to us by God, and not waste one second. Wake up to the folks in life who need our
love, right now. Wake up to the needs of
others, next door and far away, and then do something to help. Wake up to hot
coffee and sultry spring mornings and birds singing and hugs from the kids and see
all these little miracles as precious. Wake
up to passion and purpose and faith. The
choice is finally ours. To stay in bed
or to get up.
What will it take to wake you up?
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