Wake Up! by Brady

“Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is. Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids.” These are the lyrics to a song by a band named Arcade Fire. What in the world is this band trying to say? Let’s suppose that you are one of the lucky ones that gets to live the average 27,058 days (or 74.1 years) on earth, that you will spend 8117 of those days (or around 22.2 years) sleeping. To be honest, I am one of the world’s worst when it comes to sleeping in. I love sleeping so much that I would probably choose to sleep 12 hours a day if I could. But recently I’ve started to realize that this affinity for sleep may be an escape route built into my life that I need battle. I’m beginning to think that, no matter how much I need and love it, sleep actually might be a tool of the enemy.

Paul Valery, a French poet/philosopher, once said, “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” But maybe the problem with most people today is that we have lost our ability to dream while we are awake. I’m not sure if it is because we do not believe that we can make a difference anymore or if it is because we are all gradually losing our belief in a transcendent God, but we all are guilty of attempting to numb ourselves to the world’s pain around us. All I need to point to is America’s obsession with one of its favorite pastimes: golf. Ronald Sider points out that it would take $27 billion spent over eight years to prevent 30 million people from becoming infected with HIV/AIDS. This figure is far less than what we spend per year on golf alone. I have seen far too many people become absolutely obsessed with hitting a straight shot on lush grass because they can forget all of their problems while they’re out on the course. While I play golf every once and a while, how many people do you know that play recreationally and don’t let it dominate the majority of their thoughts and time?

Another way I believe that we are “sleeping in” is by the amount of time spent watching TV. The average American spends 4 hours a day (108,232 hours or 12.4 years of your life) wasting time watching TV. Again, while I do not believe TV is the “demon box,” how sickening is it to lose 12 years of your life to inactivity in front of a lifeless screen! We will spend time at work or school thinking about who the bachelor is going to give a rose to (and then not even date after the show is over), but we won’t let the thought that over half of the world lives on less than $2 a day enter our minds. How can this be?

There is an age old question that asks, “What do you give the person who has everything?” In a society where our poor are actually rich comparatively, the answer is “any mindless entertainment which will numb me to the surrounding world.” In “The Broken American Male,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach says, “The absence of intimate relationship and an inspiring institutional structure explains why deadening ourselves to life has become the all-American pastime, embraced by all strata of society. We’re just not very happy with ourselves or with our lives, so we choose various forms of escape, the drugs of choice being TV, movies, alcohol, marijuana, the Internet, pornography, impulse purchases, and celebrity gossip.” (pg. 61)

As a society, I believe we are all collectively at a crossroad. We are a point which Zechariah reached when he said, “Then the angel who had been talking with me returned and woke me, as though I had been asleep.” (Zechariah 4:1) As a nation, we are the person on the reality TV show about to eat our own feces so someone else can benefit from our stupidity for 5 minutes of entertainment. Someone needs to snap us out of our idiotic ways and we need to wake up so we can see what is happening in the world around us.

The Bible provides us a different worldview, a greater reality to live in, and calls us to live life to its fullest. In Ephesians 5:14, Paul says, “for the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said, “Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”” He is saying that if you take the risk to get out of your spiritual bed, Christ will help you live out this deeper reality. Or maybe Jesus and the Bible are too archaic for you; in that case, Arcade Fire says it this way: “People try and hide the light underneath the covers.” So awake, O sleeper; this is your wake up call. It’s time to get out of bed so that you can start dreaming.