Waking Up

I happened on an article over at SheLoves Magazine this morning. "Wake up," it says in essence, and it made me feel inferior. "Not good enough, not doing enough," ran through my mind, tumbling over themselves and making me wonder why I'm not more, not called to more, not doing more right now.

It's not that I don't have big ideas, I reminded myself, defending myself. And, unlike some, I'm not afraid of them, or at least I'm more afraid of not pursuing them than I am of putting myself out there and trying. I have a vision for writing more, and of actually bringing in enough money that way that I don't have to teach or do anything else.

And then, by grace, I became aware of my thoughts, of what I was saying to myself, and I couldn't stop them but I could watch them as they passed and I could think.

(There's such a thing as thinking too much, but sometimes thinking saves me, too.)

Waking up doesn't always mean doing more. It doesn't mean feeling like I have to be more, like I wish I'd been given more, like there's some tantalizing carrot hanging out there for me, if only I could find it.

Waking up can mean relishing the life that I have. It can mean seeing the delight in my girl's face as she sticks foam jungle stickers to her paper and tells me a rambling story about the elephant. It can mean working (not-so-hard) to make the boy grin the grin that looks like it wants to go wider than his face.

I can't explain how much I feel called to Be Here Now, to live the life I've been given instead of trying to live one that isn't mine right now. The call is to awaken, to savor, to rise up and inhabit the space I've been given in a true way instead of passing through it on my way to something better.

“When sleeping women wake, mountains move.” It's true, I suspect, but sometimes the mountain isn't where I expect it to be. Sometimes it's my own heart, sometimes it's the thing that looks like a molehill but that I keep stumbling up against anyway.

"Wake up!" is truth, but so is "Listen!". What it means for one to wake up isn't what it means for another, and doesn't have to be what it means for me. Every call is grace. Every single one, and the smallness or the bigness of it doesn't matter, isn't even seen from an eternal perspective. It's the following that matters, the following that makes us whole.