From the Soapbox

Wakeup Call

By David Zahl

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-11)

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oday’s passage is pretty unsettling. It comes from 1 Thessalonians, one of the earliest and most eschatological letters written by the apostle Paul. By “eschatological” I mean that it has to do with the end of the world—the end times. As such, the epistle brims with darkness and the expectation of Christ’s imminent second coming. In the Church today, we read this passage right before Advent, right before we celebrate the light coming into the world.

Regardless of context, the picture Paul paints of life and what will happen is not one we would paint for ourselves. He tells us that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. He says that when people are talking about peace and security, sudden destruction will come upon them the same way that labor pains come upon a pregnant woman. There will be no escape. These are scary words—but also true ones. Security can be ripped from you in a heartbeat. Parents know that any day can end at the emergency room. Some preachers are fond of saying that all of us—whether we live in Hollywood or not—are only three bad days away from being a tabloid headline.

I was speaking to someone recently who had experienced just such a destruction— very much through his own engineering. A series of bad decisions came to light, costing him both his job and his marriage. The man in question, Tullian Tchividjian, wrote about it publicly, saying that with those two losses came a thousand other ones: The loss of close friendships, the loss of credibility, the loss of security on my children’s faces, the loss of confidence in God’s goodness, the loss of financial stability. Life went from feeling like a fairy tale one moment to feeling like a violent tragedy, the next. Overnight, everything was gone.

This sort of thing happens more than you’d think. Sometimes we’re complicit in the reversal, sometimes not. It could be an accident, a diagnosis, a natural disaster. And so Paul urges us to be awake rather than asleep, to be sober rather than intoxicated, to be on guard. It’s harder than it sounds. It’s so much easier to ignore the possibility of emergency.

We prefer to sleep through life. At least I do. And from what I can tell, most of us are walking around half-asleep, halfawake, in a state of constant drowsiness. I’m not just talking physically (though I’m not not talking physically). I mean, everyone I know is tired. Who of us couldn’t use a nap?

Perhaps you beg to differ. Perhaps your life feels like anything but slumber. I never sleep, you say: life is all go, go, go, activity after activity. Well, it could be that you’re someone for whom activity or work has become a form of sleep. Writing a couple of years ago in The Economist, the essayist, Ryan Avent tried to answer the question of why Americans lead the world in untaken vacation days, why we seem to prefer to work so hard. One of the things he proposed struck me: He said that “part of the reward” of workaholism is the relief that occurs when you “immerse yourself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.”

Work, in other words, can serve as a distraction from consciousness or loneliness or grief or vulnerability. It can be a means of imposing order on the everyday chaos of relating to another person or oneself. There is a security—a comfort—in this kind of head-down mentality.

What I’m trying to say is that when Paul talks about people being asleep, he’s talking about you and me. All of us have sedatives that we lean on in life—simply whatever it is that lulls us, whatever allows us to tune out the unpleasant stuff of life and gives us a sense of control over that which cannot be controlled. Our sedative of choice distracts us from the core precariousness of life. It could be busyness. It could be buying things. It could be social media. Yes, even religion can be a sedative.

More dramatically, you hear people say that they feel like they slept through their children’s childhood, or they slept through their twenties: I don’t know where I was. I don’t know what I was doing, but I wasn’t present. Not really. Keeping one’s head down blocks out some of the fear that comes with being vulnerable in a world where disasters happen, but it also blocks out a lot of the love.

What, then, does it mean to be awake? When Paul urges us to keep awake, is he

asking that we be anxious? That we think constantly about how anything that can go wrong will go wrong? Clearly, that’s not it; his injunction is rooted in a deep, abiding faith in God. So, is he talking about wakefulness the way we do today, i.e., as self-awareness? Is he exhorting us to get in touch with how we’re affecting the world? To wake up to our bias, our privilege, our sin, or simply our feelings? All good ideas, no doubt, but not what Paul is talking about here.

The wakefulness he’s describing is a form of expectancy. Expectancy that Christ will return. And in the meantime, being awake to the fact that there is a God, and you’re not him. “Don’t get too comfortable in the world,” is what he’s saying. “And please, wake up from the nightmare that God is absent or impotent or against you somehow. Open your eyes to see the mercy of God, the power of God, the hand of God in and around you—in both the good and the bad.”

This state of mind (and spirit) sounds nice, but how does it actually come about? How do people wake up? Those who’ve logged late night hours on the highway know that it can be exceedingly difficult to stay awake sometimes. You’ve slapped yourself in the face, rolled the window down, pumped up the tunes, called everyone you know—and still, your head keeps nodding. Drowsiness overtakes a person; it feels like someone’s hands are physically on our eyelids.

Cases like these—where you cannot will yourself to stay awake—are instructive when it comes to spiritual drowsiness. Just like with highway hypnosis, it could be that we need something more than willpower to make us alert. Something stronger than caffeine, even. What we need is the jarring vibration of the road’s shoulder. We need a good wake-up call.

What was the last real wakeup call you received? Something that woke you up to reality, both the good and the bad?1 Lord knows, life can sometimes feel like a never-ending series of wakeup calls. And there are some things you can’t sleep through, no matter how hard you might wish you could. Death and divorce and war, for example. At its best, I think church can provide a more compassionate form of wakeup call.

Alas, life will wake you up. God will wake you up. It is inevitable. Yet perhaps Paul’s choice of words isn’t arbitrary when he refers to sudden destruction being akin to “labor pains.” I’ll return to my friend Tullian, who lost everything in a heartbeat.

Looking back on his crisis, he admitted something remarkable:

My losses did not simply usher in grief and shame and regret. They ushered in a severe identity crisis. Without these things that I’d come to depend on to make me feel safe and valuable, I no longer knew who I was. I had lost my very self. It was at that moment that a friend said to me something I’ll never forget. He said, “The purpose behind the suffering you’re going through now is to kick you into a new freedom from false definitions of who you are.”

The disaster—self-engineered as it was— transferred this man, at least for that week, from a false sense of security into a true sense of security. Another word for which

1. I’m reminded of a joke. There’s a guy in a hotel room, and he calls down to the front desk and says, “Hi, I’m in room 326, and I’d like to order a wakeup call.” And the person at the desk says, “Okay, none of your coworkers take you seriously, and no one is fooled by that comb over.” Heh.

is freedom. Thankfully, the freedom that comes from God extends beyond this life and our present circumstances, whatever they may be. It is not a one-time thing, nor is it necessarily premised on our ability to keep our eyes open when the road gets long. Paul gets at this later in the same passage. He says, “For God has destined us not for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live with him.”

If this sermon is a wakeup call, so be it. I hope you’ll join me in a few moments when we get down on our knees and accept the love of God in prayer. But if not, then hear me when I say that, no matter what you’re dealing with right now, God is awake to you. He is awake to your exhaustion and your fear. And he is awake in love, forgiving you your endless addiction to sedatives. This is the same God whose own destruction births new life for those stuck in cycles of darkness and pain and slumber. You are safe, in other words, not because you are able to will yourself to stay awake, or because you are strong or in control, but because God is. Not because you are blameless, but because God is. Not because you can redeem your circumstances, but because God in Jesus already has. That is his promise to you right now: Whatever darkness may come— and it will come—you, my friend, belong to the light.

MISSY ANDREWS is the author of My Divine Comedy: A Mother’s Homeschooling Journey, Wild Bells: A Literary Advent, and Teaching the Classics: A Socratic Method for Literary Education. She lives with her husband in the mountains of Eastern Washington in a house that remembers her six grown kids—and the bear that once climbed in her kitchen window.

LAURA BONDARCHUK is a frazzled bookkeeper by day, and by night she would rather write than rest, but can never find her glasses (they’re on her head). Instead, and with great resignation, she will put on a video of thunderstorm sounds to help her sleep, until her next shift at work where she pretends her job is important. Calling herself a writer by day is the dream.

TODD BREWER is the managing editor of the Mockingbird website. He graduated from Durham University in 2015 with a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies, and his thesis, “Hermeneutics and Early Christian Gospels,” is under contract with Mohr Siebeck. He co-edited the Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, 2nd ed.

SUSAN COWGER is the author of a poetry collection, Slender Warble, and a chapbook, Scarab Hiding. Founder and editor emeritus of Rock & Sling, her most recent publications include Ekphrastic Review, Windhover, Perspectives, Crux, McGuffin, Presence, and In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets. SARAH CONDON never sleeps better than she did at her grandmother’s house in 1989. Those Dolly-esque cream colored ruffled curtains only let the good light in.

CHRIS DAVIDSON is associate professor of english at Biola University and editor of The Curator. His essays and poetry have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman; Orange County: A Literary Field Guide; and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers. He has published two chapbooks — Poems (Canvas Shop Press, 2012) and Easy Meal (Californios Press, 2020).

JOSHUA EDWARDS is the author of The Double Lamp of Solitude (Rising Tide Projects), Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling), and several other books, and he translated María Baranda’s Ficticia (Shearsman) and co-translated (with Lynn Xu) Lao Yang’s Pee Poems (Circumference). He teaches at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

LAURA HUFF HILEMAN is a certified Dream Worker and Spiritual Director who has pretty good evidence that God is talking in her sleep. She facilitates online dream groups and personal dreamwork through her practice, Fire by Night Dreamwork, and teaches at The Haden Institute. Current projects include working up the nerve to kayak the Nolichucky River near her home in Jonesborough, TN.

ANNE LE DRESSAY’S poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published two chapbooks, This Body That I Live In and Woman Dreams and two books, Sleep is a Country and Old Winter. She is retired and teaches memoir writing in Ottawa.

HANNAH LOCK is an illustrator whose clients include Politico, the New York Times and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She has been known to fall asleep with her head in a good book.

KATHLEEN NORRIS is the author of Journey: New & Selected Poems, and nonfiction books including Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Acedia & Me. She’s the co-founder of SoulTelegram, a bi-weekly e-newsletter on cinema and literature.

GREG PAUL is a pastor and member, as well as a founder, of the Sanctuary community in Toronto. Greg is the author of the recently released Resurrecting Religion and several other award-winning books: Simply Open; Close Enough to Hear God Breathe; The Twenty-Piece Shuffle; and God In The Alley. He is married to Maggie; between them they have seven children and a growing brood of grandchildren.

BEN SELF spends most of his days shoving knowledge down the throats of his 8th grade civics students. But in his free time he also enjoys collecting things—children’s books, fossils, vinyl records, etc.—while always maintaining that he is definitely not a hoarder and has all of this under control. As a new dad, his latest hobby is hoarding and coveting sleep like Gollum with the One Ring. “We wants it, we needs it…!”

STEPHEN SEXTON’S first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He has been awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the winner of the National Poetry Competition. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021.

CALI YEE is the assistant editor of The Mockingbird and mbird.com. She loves falling asleep to National Treasure and Ratatouille on the couch before bed. Her “nappitizer” isn’t conducive for a good night’s rest, yet she continues to do it at least once a week.

DAVID ZAHL is the director of Mockingbird, editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird website, and co-host of The Mockingcast. In 2019, he was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea, which translates to “he’s a middle-aged man who snores a lot” and means he now uses a CPAP machine at night. His sons think it makes him look like Darth Vader. But he and his wife both think that whoever invented that thing deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

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