Ring Ring Time to “Wake Up”!

Last week I decided that it was time for me to create a “new” life/work schedule. I was determined to alter a nearly 4 decades old ritual where I would begin my day between 6 and 6:30 AM. In my “wisdom” I believed that creating a new habit and starting my day at 4:30 A.M. would be easy! My plan would allow me ample time to wake up and write BEFORE prepping breakfast, packing a lunch and driving my son to school. It all made so much sense until the alarm clock went off. Once that stupid ringer sounded, I quickly and with a bit of irritation and frustration, would reach for my phone, turn the alarm off and tell Siri to set a new alarm for my regular wake up time of 6 am.

What I find interesting is that to some of you, 4:30 seems like a piece of cake, while to others of you 6 A.M. sounds like a stretch. For nearly 2 decades of my life I was a musician. In those days waking up at 4:30 would have been impossible because more often than not, I hadn’t even gone to bed yet! Time is what we make of it. As many self help experts have already stated, time is the great equalizer. Each day, we all have the exact same amount of it, 24 hours. And since that is true, how is it that one person seems to accomplish so much more in their 24 hours than another?  Or for that matter in their life?

I swear that I have some friends that NEVER sleep, at least according to their social media posts! But is “sleep” really what God is referring to in Proverbs 20:13 or is sleep simply a metaphor? Here is the verse. Proverbs 20:13 Do not love sleep or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have food to spare.  While I certainly like to lay on my comfy bed and get a good night’s rest, I certainly don’t “love” sleep. In fact, for as long as I can remember I wake up early and stay up late. Often only sleeping 5-7 hours a night. Yet, many days go by where I don’t feel nearly as productive as I should be. Many days I feel as though my day is controlling me rather than me, controlling my day.

Sometimes it’s due to the commitments that come with raising a child as a divorced father. Other times its because I lose valuable time while working on projects of little importance. Even worse is when I find myself losing time binge watching Netflix, playing a video game or talking on the phone. However, without question, the biggest “soaker” of time for me is and always has been my thoughts. Those darn negative thoughts used to have the power to transport me down a rabbit hole of epic proportion. Today, through a lot of self awareness, honestly and hard work, those epic rabbit holes have become more like a shallow trench. I still find myself falling in the trench but once I recognize that I’m there, it is a lot easier to step out of the trench that it was to leave the rabbit hole.

If there were a stop watch on my life that tracked the countless hours I have spent worrying about things that I can’t control, thinking about things that do not matter or giving my energy to those that don’t deserve it, I would be truly sad to see how much time I have wasted. If you add to that all the hours that I have spent in pursuit of things that don’t matter or doing things that serve no purpose, I could become downright depressed.

When I first thought about this verse it was all about my alarm clock. I took it as a sign from God that I needed to follow through and wake up earlier in the day. However, after examining this verse more closely, I believe that God isn’t telling me to wake up earlier, what God is actually saying to me is that it is time to “WAKE UP!”.

“Sleep” isn’t about the time we spend laying down with our eyes closed. “Sleep” is about all the time we waste as we “sleep walk” through life, unfocused, without direction and with no purpose. If you are reading this and agree but for what ever reason are still unsure of your purpose, please take some advice from one of my favorite books, “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. In his book Gay states that finding your purpose is easy. All you have to do is ask yourself 2 questions. 1) Who do I serve? 2) How do I serve them?

When we begin to live with the purpose for which God created us to live, we will no longer “sleep walk” through life. Rather, we will stay “awake” with an abundance of “food” to feed our soul.

I hope that you have a great day!

Kevin