It's Time to WAKE Up!

I’ve been known to hit the snooze button a time or two too many in mornings gone by, only to finally arise and realize that my writing time for that day was simply slept away.

Like so many folks with jobs and families to take care of, my days seem to be full from dawn to dusk. My passion for writing is given just one hour first thing on awakening each morning…if I get up on time. If I snooze it away I am just out of luck, because there is nothing optional about the next items on the list. Perhaps the flame of my creativity was burning a little low in recent months because that fire wasn’t getting fed as often as it should have been, the time devoted to it so regularly given over to a few extra zzzzz’s. The lower it burned the easier it seemed to be to find that snooze button on the phone.

The Challenge changed all that. My interest piqued, I knew that I wouldn’t have a moment to spare in the mornings if I wanted to fully participate, and would have to respond on the first sounding of the alarm. To ensure that would happen, I placed the phone well out of my reach when climbing into bed each night. Once my feet hit the floor to turn it off in the morning I’d just keep them moving forward and found that as a result I’d won that particular battle for the day.

But there was more. On the spur of the moment I decided to start and enter this additional blog in the Challenge, even though I wasn’t given an extra dispensation of hours in my day to devote to it. And I was also keenly aware that there was more to the project than just writing and posting; visiting and commenting on other blogs was equally important if I was going to do the thing right. The first week of April was interesting as a result, as each night I’d set the alarm for an earlier time than I did the night before to try to relieve the pressure of the morning I’d experienced that day. Finally I hit upon a schedule that seemed to work…if I was faithful to it. And amazingly my desire to participate overcame my devotion to sleep.

It’s not just our mornings we sleep through, of course. Some of us are snoring our way through our days…and find that our lives are passing us by, as a result. Like the hours in a day, we are each only given so much time to accomplish what we’ve been given to do, with the added wrinkle that we don’t even know how much time that is! If we believe that we’re to be about the Father’s business, some of us had better realize that we can’t consistently show up late for work. It’s time we got up in response to His urging to jump into the fray. We may be surprised to find that there is simply no more delightful way to spend our days.

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might…”
(Ecclesiastes 9:10 NIV)