Early Will I Seek You

If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice,
I'll go to sleep each night trusting in you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message

How we need this. How desperately we must awaken each day into the Gospel Narrative, to be reminded deeply of our place in it and God’s heart toward us in announcing the Kingdom come for us. How quickly we forget.

In his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marques tells the story of the Buendía family, and through them the rise and fall of the township of Macondo. At one point there was a plague of insomnia that swept through the town. No one could sleep, and so the people began to slowly lose their mental facilities. Because they began forgetting things, they wrote down the names of objects around them and stuck them all over town. “Cow,” “Door,” “House,” etc. Then, they realized they could read the names of objects but not know what to do with them, so they described them further, “Cow: Milk in the mornings,” “Door: Push to open,” “House: Enter for shelter,” etc. On the outskirts of town, they even posted a sign to help them remember, “God Exists.”

John Eldredge tells about reading this story and finding it so ridiculous… until he realized how much like his own story it is. He wrote that he wished he had a sign posted above his bed in the morning so that when he woke up the first thing he would read was simply, “God Exists.”

That’s all of our stories. We wake up… and forget. God knows this. How He must know this. The Old Testament is full of stories of God in fellowship with his children that forgot him constantly.

And so here’s one of the greatest provisions of the New Covenant: He’s provided for this by giving us the Spirit of life to remind us and teach us as the disciples and apprentices we are called to be (John 14:26). How cool is that!

“You are all [children] of the light and… of the day… So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep… “ 1 Thess 5:5-6

I love how St. Francis of Assisi reminds us to “remember at all times – it is God himself, breathing within, who woos us and calls us to live as His sons and daughters.”

And so, we pray with Brennan Manning: “Jesus, Son of the living God, anoint us with fire this day. Let your Word not shine in our hearts, but let it burn. Let there be no division, compromise, or holding back. Separate the mystics from the romantics, and goad us to that daredevil leap into the abyss of your love.”

Being awakened is, of course, just the beginning. We come into the Life that Jesus promised us.

The psalm finishes:

Point out the road I must travel;
I'm all ears, all eyes before you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message