Are You a Sleep Walker?

Is 49:3, 5-6 / 1 Cor 1:1-3 / Jn 1:29-34

At the end of a long business trip, a man was searching for a gift to take home to his wife. "How about some perfume?" he asked the clerk. She showed him a bottle for $50.

"That's too much," he replied. So the clerk showed him a smaller bottle for $30. "That's still quite a bit," he complained.

Rolling her eyes, the clerk brought out a tiny bottle for $15. Again he shook his head. "What I mean is I'd like to see something REAL cheap." With that the clerk handed him a mirror!

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Sometimes it takes us quite a while to recognize the truth. Just look at John the Baptist in the Gospel. He's known Jesus all his life, but shaking his head he says, "I didn't recognize him.... How could I have missed it? I just didn't recognize him!"

How often that happens. How much we miss. And nowhere is that more true than when it comes to seeing ourselves. It's strange but true that relatively few of us would recognize ourselves in a "blind tasting" where our physical appearance was just slightly disguised!

Our ordinary conversation reveals that relatively few of us recognize what makes us special and what rightly endears us to others. We just don't see even half of our own goodness.

Relatively few of us are really aware of WHY we do much of what we do. We see mainly the surface of things which can cover up both the good and the bad, and can keep us perpetual adolescents and perpetual victims to life's surprises.

Relatively few of us recognize that many of the "streets" we drive on daily are dead ends.

In a word, many of us are habitual "sleep walkers" which is costly in the extreme. It robs us of the delight that should be ours at seeing our goodness, our giftedness, and our hard won progress.

It robs us of the chance of growing and getting better.

Being "sleep walkers" condemns us to half a life and, eventually, to dying without ever having know ourselves or our friends.

None of that is what God wants for us. God wants our life to be like his: Conscious, full, and fearless. His constant call to us is to step out of the dark into the light. His repeated assurance is that he'll give us what we need to look within fearlessly and to see what is there ... and what is not. His promise is nothing less than his own Spirit by whose power we can do whatever is necessary to respond to the truth he helps us see.

God wants a whole life for you and me, and not just a fragment. So why not step out into the light and let him show us the way?