jordanabina
Out of all the inventions mankind has offered this world the alarm clock has to be the most hated. Alarms clocks are heretical. It’s as if their voice offends all who hear it and each of us have a universal response to its nagging voice, snooze.
For me, it’s Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog’s Day. Every morning, at what I think is 6am, the same song comes on and it begins to drive him crazy. My favorite scene with the alarm clock is when Murray wakes up and smashes it with his fist. Humans hate alarm clocks, but we’re the only species on the planet who believes they need them.
My wife recently bought a different kind of device to help wake us from our, hopefully, uninterrupted sleep. It’s one of those dome lights that gradually turn on and is at its brightest at the time you set it to. So basically, if you want to get up at 6am, the light turns on in a low purplish-blue light and gradually fills your room with light until it reaches the brightest over the course of about an hour.
Honestly I didn’t think I was going to like it, I thought there was no way I was going to get up to something like this, especially since I had been waking up to a jolting alarm for so long. Turns out I was wrong.
My wife and I were shocked by how much more peaceful our awakening was with this new morning light and actually started laughing about it in bed that first morning. For the first time in years, I didn’t wake up to my phone blaring music or some pre-loaded irritating sound effect. Instead we woke up to a more natural light.
There are so many things to be studied in this life and so many things you can devote your life to wondering and learning about, but the concept of sleep has always intrigued me. Sleep is one of those things that no one can escape, human or animal alike. You can fight it, but you will lose.
You can try to control it, but it will break free.
Sleep is like a switch that has been put in every living thing that cannot be turned off, and when tampered with can have some destructive consequences.
God in his wisdom, has seen it fit to make all of us have to go to sleep at the end of each day. Think about that, we don’t have a choice. When we’re young we think we do, but it eventually catches us to us.
The young mind believes taking a nap is the single worst thing imaginable, something to be avoided at all costs.
The young mind believes bedtime is something to battle against, declaring to the world and the governing authorities which surround it, I’m not tired! The young mind would never consider that the rhythms put into place by God are for us and not against us. As you may or may not know, things change.
I think God is flexing when it comes to sleep, don’t you? God is showing us just how in control He really. He basically puts a system shut down on our bodies that is impossible to counteract and reverse. The question becomes, is it for our benefit or is it to enslave us? Why would God make us sleep? And why do we want to wake up so bad, and why would we be willing to create a device that has the word alarm in it to do it? I hate feeling alarmed, don’t you?
I got off a plane in France less than 24 hours ago. Needless to say, my body feels like it just ran a marathon and my brain feels like mush. I stayed awake through the 11-hour flight, while my family slept around me, in hopes to counteract the jet lag I would inevitably feel upon arrival. It was going well for a while, until it wasn’t.
I woke up in a pool of drool, holding my phone, on a small couch from an Airbnb we’ve rented to stay in 30 minutes outside Auxerre. My kids woke me up, violently I might add, and reminded me that it was only 2pm where we were. I wanted to cry.
But after a good night’s sleep I find myself awake and alone. I’m sitting in a brown woven chair on the back deck of a small and quaint little cottage next to a farm somewhere in the French countryside. As I sit here, I’m starting to notice something, there are alarm clocks going off all around me. But I think alarm isn’t the word to be used to describe all of it. They are more like signals or omens of the coming of a new day. Nothing about them feels alarming and everything about them seems to bring a sense of calm.
The first sign I see are the cows. They’re completely white here and they’ve been letting me know that they are awake for the last hour. Mooing and grazing, curiously walking into the day ahead. There are two squirrels busy hopping from tree to tree, scurrying and busying themselves with their habitual play routine. The birds are everywhere, most are a type I’ve never seen before. Bugs whizzing by. Everything seems to wake up quite naturally.
God is in this somewhere. I sense He is saying something to me, and to all of us throughout time, through the wonderful world of nature He’s made. So many lessons to discover, creation is a wonderful teacher. Although sleep has always fascinated me, mother’s nature lesson for this morning is waking up.
How do we wake up? Let’s explore this physically and metaphysically.
As physical creatures, God has designed us to enjoy the time given to us and then rest. In the United States, we work to get to rest, but in many other places, including France, they rest to work. Rest becomes what fuels and recharges instead of what comes as a last-ditch effort to avoid death.
Think about what type of imagination God must have to make a ball of fire that heats a planet and just the right temperature to sustain life while also allows earth to orbit at just the right speed so that we can have just the right amount of sleep. Wow.
I think physically speaking it’s better to walk in the rhythms that God has naturally given us on earth. To sleep when the sun goes down and to wake when the sun rises. Although, I’ve found waking just before the sun rises to be another way of enjoying the rising sun.
But more to the metaphysical, more to the Spiritual part of who we are…how do we wake up?
Something interesting happened this morning as I’ve sat here. Around 8:30am, long after the sun had risen and long after my new squirrel friends had begun tending to their tasks, the church bells from the nearby town started to ring.
Gong. Gong. Gong.
Here’s an interesting question, is it the job of the church to wake up the Spiritually asleep in this world? We can answer this question a lot of different ways, right? What do you mean by church? What do you mean by Spiritually asleep? What do you mean by job?
We can answer yes, and we can answer no.
But what I’m thinking about this morning is that it is very likely that God has been speaking to people about Himself, long before the Church bells ring. The imprint of His goodness is somewhere in the rising sun, somewhere in the dawn of a new day, somewhere in the warmth of the morning rays.
Dawn makes us think if hope, it makes us believe we have another chance, and it restores a feeling that we can be better today than we were yesterday.
Why do we think these things? Just stop and really ask yourself that. Why does the sunrise bring the thought of hope? How did that get there? That doesn’t make any sense on paper. But life doesn’t happen on paper, it happens in the living and breathing world God has made.
God stirs hope in us through the rising of the Sun, he put that truth inside of that natural phenomenon.
Then the Holy Spirit reveals this truth through His word.
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies are made new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Lamentations 22-23
The depraved mind may squander the splendor of sleep, but anyone who reads this passage should welcome the night because the morning of mercy is coming. Mornings weren’t meant to bring alarm; they’re meant for mercy. Starting my day with Jesus brings me into that reality, into that space and out of the alarm that I may face in the hours ahead.
Everybody, everywhere, has to sleep; and everybody is going to have to wake up. So be it, bring the new day. May it be that we welcome the sun and the moon as signs that God knows what He is doing and wants to enable and empower us for the tasks ahead, and when we fail, morning is coming.
The most natural way to wake up, physically and spiritually, is in the light of the Sun and in the light of Christ (or Son).
Last thought. Listen to this passage.
“And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb…and its gates will never be shut by day-and there will be no night there.”
Revelation 21:22-23.25
This idea used to freak me out. No night? No sleep? No thank you.
But the young mind only sees what’s directly in front of its eyes, nothing beyond. In this world, we cannot survive without sleep, it damages are natural body and robs us from our fullness. This is something we know and understand, but what the human race has yet to see is the same applies to our connection with God the creator. And knowing this, God has created something, sleep, that continually reminds us of our dependency on the natural order of things.
The sun setting, the night coming, a cycle of sleep, and the dawn. To the natural mind this is nothing but an anomaly formed out of nothing, but to those who see Jesus, they know it is a gift of grace wooing us closer to the Father.
In heaven there will be no need for sleep, the work is done.
In heaven there will be no need for night, because we will be truly and maybe for the first time ever, awake.
In heaven there will be no sun, because, well, Jesus.
