11... the
hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to
us now than when we first believed. 12 The night is far gone; the day is
at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put
on the armor of light. 13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime ...(and) 14put on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
I feel like so often I struggle
with the state of being awake. To feel like I am mentally present in a world
that moves so fast... After suffering with insomnia for many of my teenage
years I felt so frequently that I just existed, that I woke in the morning and
floated through an inanimate world with impersonal people. I waited for the
light, for someone to pull me out of the abyss, out of my induced slumber, but was saddened that
after so great and long a time that I never surfaced. God calls out in this
verse to wake up, "Wake Up!" As in I am commanding you to "wake
up", as in "I would not be asking you to do this if you were not able
to do so," as in "You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you" and
that this Christ has already empowered you with that which you need to rise and
thus your time to rise is now. With the appropriation of all that one could possible
need to escape, obscurity becomes a choice. The state of constant (and I stress
here constant and not momentary, for all will feel at some point overcome)
opacity is not because God left us, or somehow stopped loving us, but
because we, and particularly me, have chosen in our blind-arrogance to
fuel our own affirmation.
The water is a place we will find
ourselves thousands of time, we will take our eyes off Christ and we will feel
the pain that comes when the water floods our faces and Christ seems no longer
close at hand. But in the saving
act of Humanity and the words from Ephesian 2 the true nature of our King is
shown, "But God...". We choose to take our eyes off Christ and we fall
into the water rightfully so, but God stands waiting to catch us, reaching his
arms out to tend his lost sheep, waiting and Knocking: waiting for us to
realize his great love for us, and knocking by hitting us with the waves that
fill our lungs and cause us to understand that we are sinking. The water is the
only place one can realize the sadness felt by the prodigal son,
the darkness of the sea is the only placeholder that exists for a Follower who
forgot that he was meant to follow, the cold inebriation exists not to
punish the redeemed but help us comprehend sobriety. There exists a God waiting
for us to let him love us, he stands with arms wide open reaching to embrace
us, we just need to decide first that we want him and not the abyss...
