We can live and yet be dead. We can think we are awake and yet be asleep. Death can be like sleep. Sleep can be like death. (Eph 2:1; Rom 13:11).
But sometimes as our eyes slowly open and focus, we find ourselves taking a fresh breath of air that, as it turns out, was on the other side of what we regarded as “death”. The very thing that we had so resisted turned out to be more like life than our nightmarish fears had ever been.
Maybe this is some of what is wrong with our addiction to self-protection. Real life comes only on the other side of dying to our natural inclinations. We wake-up to the reason for which we were born only as we let our insanity die in our Lord’s invitation to rest in him…and in his faith, hope, and love.
That must be some of what Paul wanted us to see when he wrote things like, “Now, it is high time to wake up!” (Rom 13:11); and when he wrote, “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2Cor 4:8-11).
My guess is that this is the story line we are all sleeping through and awakening to in so many similar and yet different ways…
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