Sleeping

What with the pain, the awkward sleeping positions I must assume, and the pain meds I was taking last week -- which gave me strange dreams -- I've had opportunity to reflect on the similarity between being asleep and being out of fellowship/God's plan. Since the Bible talks about people in spiritual or temporal death as being asleep, this is not an unreasonable line of thought.

When we fall asleep we are no longer aware of reality. Instead we have dreams about a highly subjective set of circumstances and events -- things drawn from our own heads -- memories, desires, frustrations, concerns, etc. They make sense in the dream and might even seem very important... but when we wake up, we realize they made no sense at all and those things that seemed so important are trivial. In the dream, we've been completely cut off from reality, shut up in a reality of our own making.

Not only that, we awake to find that hours have passed in the real world! We've "lost" time.

In the same way, when we are out of fellowship, or the plan of God, we are all caught up in our own petty concerns, the illusions of the world, and the influence of other people who have sin natures and faulty thinking. God's word seems flat and irrelevant, and the Lord some dusty historical figure who has little connection to our lives.We've fallen asleep. We're no longer connected to the ultimate reality of the spiritual life. We need to wake up.

We need to ... rebound! :-)

Karen