Awakening

Life takes one through many different nights.  Some are peaceful and rejuvenating.  Others are the opposite extreme; restless, sweat and chill filled, uncertain nights which haunt one long after the new dawn has arrived.  Then there are those where one dreams – long, full dreams with reflections long into the mornings which follow.  For me flying is an excuse for dream filled naps.  I know in the interim I am never sure if I am sleeping, power-napping, or merely dozing but the insights which come in this moment of strange isolation is always the same.  I find myself examining my priorities, visioning the relationships around me, and imaging the future with different frameworks.
 
Last night was a short flight from California to New York.  Yet my sleep reawakened and strengthened my understanding of the God I hold close to my heart.  I find myself walking in solidarity of a people of old.  The present changed when the future became the present.  It had been told that “the Day is coming when people will notice The One Who Made Them, take a long hard look at The Holy of Israel.  They'll lose interest in all the stuff they've made—altars and monuments and rituals, their homemade, handmade religion—however impressive it is.”  (Isaiah 17.7, 8)  When it arrived everything was and is different.
 
It’s ironic how easily we loose touch with the God we think we are holding close to our hearts.  It is as if we construct facades, longing to believe how our constructions are the same as, maybe even better, than the God we first discovered.  Yet, in whatever triggers lies within your life and mine, there is a time of reflection and examination.  Do we realize who or what we worshipped yesterday?  Is it the God of our choosing or one of made by our hands?
 
Today is an opportunity – for you and me – to wake, be aware, and choose.  I cannot make your choice or you mine.  Yet we can be involved in each others lives.  We can support and nurture our different journeys.