When God Wakes You Up at 3 a.m.

I woke up at 3 a.m. last night, and I was annoyed about it.

The kind of annoyed where you lie there and start making mental lists — did I forget to set the coffee, did I leave the dryer running, why is my brain doing this? The kind of annoyed that makes you want to be annoyed at something, even if there is nothing to be annoyed at.

I have heard people say that sometimes God uses the early hours to wake us up. I always thought that was a nice thing for them. Last night I started to wonder if it was, possibly, a thing for me.

So I got up. I made tea. I sat down with my journal.

And the questions came.

Not the gentle questions. The hard ones.

Would I sacrifice my life for Christ?

Am I living a life He would recognize as His?

Does my life reflect one that truly lives for Him?

I sat there for a while. The tea got cold. The questions did not get easier.

Here's what came up underneath all of it.

A few months ago, in a counseling session, I admitted something I had not been able to say out loud before. I knew God loved me. I had said that for years. I had taught Bible studies on it. I had sung it in church.

But I did not believe He liked me.

Loved me — yes. The way you love a difficult relative you are obligated to love. The way the Bible says you are supposed to love.

Liked me — no. Not really. Not the way you like a friend you would want to spend a Saturday afternoon with.

The wall I did not know I had built was right there in that distinction. Loved meant He had to. Liked meant He chose to. And somewhere along the way, I had decided that what He had to do was probably the only thing I could count on.

I am writing this in case anyone else has built that same wall and not noticed.

The years before this had been hard. Cancer. Lymphedema. Dysautonomia. Two new knees. A medical history long enough that I have stopped being surprised by it.

And somewhere in all of that, life pain became my excuse. The surgeries became my excuse. The exhaustion became my excuse. Of course I am not as close to God as I used to be — look at what I have been through.

It was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

It was also a wall.

Last night, at 3 a.m., I sat with that.

I thought about the years that had quietly slipped past. The Sabbaths I had stopped keeping. The church we had stopped attending. The Bible studies I did at home alone, telling myself that was enough, knowing somewhere deeper that it was not.

And I thought about complacency, which is such an unglamorous sin that no one really wants to confess it. Pride is dramatic. Anger is dramatic. Complacency just means you let your faith get a little stale and stopped reaching for the thing that used to feed you.

I had been complacent. For longer than I realized.

I sat with that, too.

Here is what I am learning, mostly because I am being slowly forced to learn it.

We have started going back to church. Not because everything is fixed, but because something inside me said go. We are honoring Sabbath again — actual stop-working-actual-rest-actual-quiet Sabbath, the kind that feels strange and slightly inefficient and turns out to be the medicine we did not know we were missing.

I am praying differently. More honestly. Less politely.

I am letting God meet me on the inconvenient Tuesdays of my life — the swollen-arm days, the surgery days, the days I cannot do the thing I wanted to do — and slowly, carefully, learning to believe that He likes being there with me. Not just obligated to. Likes to.

That is the wall coming down.

It is not coming down all at once. It is coming down one 3 a.m. at a time.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you, too, have been quietly, respectably drifting — I want to tell you what I told myself last night:

It is not too late.

You do not need a dramatic moment. You do not need a near-death experience.

You need to sit down with a cup of tea at 3 a.m., let the questions come, and answer them honestly.

That is the whole start.

The rest of it — the church, the Sabbath, the Bible, the prayer — is just walking back in the direction you were already meant to be heading.