This morning the fire alarm was sounding. I woke up, but I couldn't even find my bearings. I needed to put some clothes on or at least I was pretty sure I needed to wear clothes. Maybe it was important that I matched, or wait... maybe it didn't. It took me a full 4 minutes of wandering in a stupor before I finally realized the alarm was sounding from a different building. I was safe.
Or was I?
It dawned on me later that in the midst of a real fire that my sleep altered brain could have been the death of me. I wonder: How many people have died due to sleep?
Even more disturbing: How many people have died due to being half-awake to the reality that they might be in danger? Almost safe is not always quite safe enough.
Over the last several months I have had the unsettling experience of my sleep being disturbed. I have been waking in the middle of the night with all kinds of unsettling thoughts. Feelings of impending doom, anxiety, and nightmares. I suppose some would say I might have a condition.
They might be right. My own self-diagnosis: Spiritual Insomnia
Spiritual Insomnia (my definition by experience) is characterized by a desire to stay blissfully unaware of anything that challenges that which I have tried to believe based on the feared consequences of believing something else instead. This desire is accompanied by periods of anxiety, panic, unsettledness, restlessness, thoughts of impending doom. It is the feeling that at any moment the ground I stand on will suddenly vanish. Alternately it is also accompanied by periods of a sense of calm, peace, happiness, confidence and certainty. But all the while, there is still an underlying unsettled feeling that something is lurking around the corner.
I've suffered from this condition for years actually. But in the last several months the periods of unsettledness seemed to increase (especially at night) and so did my denial (especially during the day). I continued to tell myself that I was actually more at peace and more confident about what I believed. And then my house of cards began to crash.
Like a fire alarm I felt like God asked me a question--
"Jason, what is it that you're afraid that I might really be like?"
Seems like a simple enough question. What on earth (or in Heaven) did my heart believe that I had to fear that I was waking up with a sense of impending doom.
I wrote a list of my fears that I realized at some level my heart was still believing about God. As a result I discovered a distorted image of God that I had been trying to relate to which was cruel, sadistic, unpredictable and harsh. I was confused. Haven't I already debunked this distorted image from my heart before? What happened to the God who loves the world so much that He sent His Son to save us? Clearly there was some interference coming through my internal radio that was still distorting the message.
Fear! My heart was still fearfully clinging to the old distortion out of fear of being wrong and being punished.
Yet throughout the struggle I resisted and questioned embracing the distorted image of God which led to the fitful and sleep disturbed nights.
Through this process I have come to a conviction that the distortion really wasn't true. Already it has made a huge difference in my ability to trust God in a new and wonderful way. It has actually strengthened my ability follow Him. This new experience of being spiritually awake now feels much better than the nightmare I was trying to escape while I was asleep. God is not the sadistic, angry tyrant I secretly feared Him to be.
More and more I'm experiencing that God really is more loving, powerful, wise and wonderful than you and I could possibly imagine. I have tasted and experienced His supernatural presence in my life.
I have felt an urgency that God wants us to become certain of Him in these tumultuous times which is why I have started this blog. The alarms are sounding across the globe and they are signaling a brewing storm for those who have eyes and ears to perceive it. People's core beliefs will be challenged. The faith of many will be stretched beyond the breaking point in the face of confusion and disappointment. God wants to break open our boxes of understanding in which we hide our graven images of Him so we can experience that He truly is trustworthy and we can depend on Him no matter what circumstances we face.
read Ephesians 3:14-21
