I was originally going to write this article on something else, but plans changed on Highway 29 somewhere between Spartanburg and Greenville.  I was listening to the album Oh! Gravity while driving home and the song “Awakenings” began to play.  And my mind began to spin. 

The ideas of dreams and awakenings have been popping up in my life a lot recently.  Last Sunday, I visited a church in Nashville with EA’s family and the guest speaker used the acronym AWAKE to emphasize our need to wake up to those in need around the world.  Earlier in the week I was reading a book in which the author described the Sermon on the Mount as God’s dream for humanity.  And as I think about, the theme of waking up both subtly and obviously worked its way throughout the summer at Seesalt as we focused on the Kalos Project and the idea of a better tomorrow.

“God really woke me up.”  I hear that a lot.  I’ve said it a time or two myself.  What is it about that image of waking up that seems capture what happens when God transforms our lives?

Before Christ, I think we’re stuck in this world that isn’t real.  You could call it a dreamland, but there is probably more nightmare to it.  We run after all this stuff that just won’t satisfy.  A dream job.  A dream girl or guy.  A dream car.  Money.  Power.  Popularity.  Sex.  Whatever. And none of it is real, because it will never completely satisfy.  It is all temporary.  We are, as the author of Ecclesiastes would say, chasing the wind.

In this dreamland where no one has their dreams fulfilled, everyone is broken.  So we do horrible things to one another and that is when the dreamland truly becomes a nightmare.  And it seems like no one can wake up.

This is where God’s dream for humanity comes in and His dream is not the stuff of fantasy.  It is like the dream in Martin Luther King’s historic speech or the dreams that parents have for their newborn child.  It is real, God’s dream.  How it was supposed to be and how it is still meant to be.

So when God wakes us up, you and I see the real world underneath all of this nonsense (kind of like The Matrix but that illustration has been beat into the ground).  We run after God instead of the temporary stuff of dreamland.  Instead of seeing enemies, we see people that we are called to love.  When God wakes us up, it transforms how we see the world and changes the way that we live our lives.  We wake up to see a fallen and broken world, but we also see the chance for a better tomorrow through Christ.

There are many stories of awakenings in the gospels.  One, found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is the story of a young girl dying.  Her father came to Jesus to ask for help, but while they were still on their way the girl had died.  When they got to the house, Jesus asked the mourners why they were making all the commotion since the little girl was not dead, but just asleep.  Now my translation of the Bible says that the mourners laughed it him, but I have a hunch that the response was a little angrier than a chuckle.

Jesus sent everyone out and went to the girl’s room.  He took her hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”  And she did.  She woke up.

We are dead without Christ; stuck in a nightmare where we could have everything the world has to offer and find out that it’s worth nothing.  And even after we decide to turn our lives over to God, we sometimes doze off forgetting the life to which we’re called.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sleepwalk through life.

Each one of us can wake up.  Now.  Maybe you had a spiritual high at Seesalt or another camp this summer but the world is lulling you back to sleep.  Perhaps it has been years since you cared about anything having to do with God.  It doesn’t matter.  Christ is calling out to each one of us, “I say to you, get up!”

God has dream for each of us and for the world.  It’s time to wake up and live that out.