Asleep.

I am asleep in the light.

I am a Christian. I asked Christ into my life when I was 15 years old. The first miracle I ever witnessed was watching my father, who had been chained to drugs, alcohol and his own selfish pursuits transform overnight into a man free of them. My first glimpse of who God really was, was as a life changer.

I grew in my knowledge and faith, finding myself soaking up the word and his love, his soul quenching love for me when I was so broken and afraid. My spirit had become as a parched earth, cracked and hard. I had come from an abusive background, physical and sexual abuse. I had killed the hope of there being the fairytale kind love. It hurt too much to let it sit there mocking me. So I used others to get my own needs met. I assessed a room quickly to see who wanted what out of me, and if I was willing to give it or not. I manipulated in order to make sure that I was never again left without control or power.

Then, that day long ago when I was 15, I felt the first stirrings of God in the form of his Spirit. I throbbed with the fear that He was real, and feared just as equally that He was in fact real. For if there were such a thing as God, if His Spirit and His Son truly existed outside of the fairy tale that I had placed him in, then I would either have to act on it, or turn away from it entirely; for this love, this passion was larger than the tide that my life drifted in. I was hurting, half dead with soul malnourishment, flashbacks, fear of never finding anyone who would love me -- or worse, letting someone inside that wall I’d erected to keep myself safe. Love, would make me vulnerable. I was starving inside my own prison.

The thing is, My understanding of God came in parts. My hunger pulled me from the cage, starved and mangled, twisted with need and greedy for those things that satisfy I approached God for the first time. He bathed me in light, and I was ashamed of all those things that I had armored myself with. My scheming nature was exposed, and in the light of that warmth, I saw it for what it was. I saw how I had used people and reacted out of my own pain, hurting those around me. I sobbed, feeling hopeless, for those very coping skills that had kept me sane while in abuse, were no longer needed in my present state.

How to make myself clean?

How to undo what years of pain had wrought?

Why would he call me? What could I possibly have to offer Him? I was despicable and empty.

Just when I didn’t think I could stand being in that light any longer, I saw the way. I saw how it wasn’t my righteousness or usefulness but Jesus’s that made the difference. He saw things in me that I didn’t. He saw what my life would look like when that dry cracked ground was saturated with Christ. He saw the soil of my soul, with righteousness seeded into it. He could see the future, a possible future. And with trembling steps, I began my walk of faith.

Over twenty years later, I am a mother of five. I have seen the illustration of what it might be like to be called the bride of Christ when I submit to the authority and care of my husband. I have glimpsed as through a bubbled and warped glass, the nature of his love for me when I became a mother myself. He established the dynamics and relationships that we weave our lives in and out of every day, the heavenly blueprint, mirrored here. I only needed to experience it from that viewpoint to understand it on that level.

Now, I am going to church and training my children to love him too. We go to worship him and my spirit responds to him through song. I serve the body through leading the jr. high youth of our congregation. My passion for people, my dedication to Him has not stopped, though I have often been sidetracked by the busyness of life.

But still, I find that I cling to old and familiar ways. My heart has been forever changed, my life transformed and my passion is still hot, however, we live in America in a culture that is radically different from the way God calls us to live move and be. The abundant life that he calls us to is not one that satisfies our desire for more things, to get ahead in the world or to succeed. His call is not about our own happiness, making a comfortable and safe nest of our lives built by what we can own or make payments upon.

We are asleep in our safe little worlds where no one gets to see each others pain or mess. I once had an inner wall that protected me from the world, and it shielded me from others viewing my strangeness and my inner deformities. I have found that there is another wall, one I have not been able to find a way out of yet that prevents us from truly living that radical and extreme love that Christ lived out. This wall is covered in pleasure, and exudes a lassitude that invites us one and all to… sleep. Hours of our time pulsates to this wall of pleasure. Even those of us who are serious about our love for the Lord, we throb, to the metronome of it by asking that God make our friends, who’s lives are messy with cancer, divorce, mental illness become once again smooth and calm. That the distresses would be removed and the path made clear so that they would be comfortable.

I wonder at what Jesus would say to that.

So now I tremble yet again. This time, not at the inner wall that hid me, but at this outer wall of American culture and comfort where so many others and me have been napping. And I am afraid. I am afraid that I will feel this today, and tomorrow I will fall back to sleep.

In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus walked a ways out from his disciples and begged them to pray. Pray for me, he said, while he prayed for the cup to pass and for the courage to remain there. He knew the soldiers were coming, he ahd sent Judas off into the night himself, setting those wheels into motion. And now he prayed for it to pass or for another way to be made, like Abraham when the cry of the ram in the thicket released him from that terrible duty.

I am still saved, I am still one of his disciples crying out for others to see what His deep love can do, how it can transform a life… but like Peter, James and John, there in the garden, I sleep.

There is a parable of the ten virgins, warning them to keep their lamps ready, to be able to meet the Bridegroom. Our culture is different today than it was when that metaphor was used to the Israelites. A man pledged to a woman in a binding that was as strong as marriage, but the wedding itself, the ceremony and banquet didn’t happen until he had built his house and could provide for his bride and new family. Her job while he was gone, was to remain pure, assemble the necessities for the household, and keep oil in her lamp (to be ready) for the call to arise and join him, the actual wedding day could come at any time. She must be ready when he calls.

The story tells of how only half of the brides who were called were ready, and how even now the call goes out that the bridegroom comes.

*sigh*

Today I tremble. Today I feel hollowed out for the vision of the radical ways in which He calls us to live, to love and to act toward one another. We are so alone inside our inner prisons and outer walls of comfort. We see this bright vision when we are in church on Sundays, we warm our hands by it, open our spirits to it in praise… but we never actually leave the doorway of salvation, we never truly… wake up.