I don’t generally wake up in the morning with a smile on my face. Coming out of sleep, especially when it is the sound of an alarm that has roused me, is rarely a pleasant experience for me. It is often an experience of regret – wishing that I could stay longer.
It occurred to me this morning that my state of mind in the morning is not a good measure of how my life is going. It is one of those obvious things that somehow manages to feel like a revelation when it comes. If I always feel somewhat grumpy and somewhat regretful when I first wake up, these feelings are not a reflection of the state of my life, unless I am always grumpy and regretful, and I’m not. I can clearly remember times in my life when I have been happy and when things have been going very well for me.
What makes this seem like such a revelation to me is that I was realizing that there are times in my life when I have taken this feeling in completely the wrong way and I have risen from slumber and taken my grumpiness to be a sure sign that my life is in shambles. There have been many mornings when I have allowed this regret for a sleep interrupted to become the foundation for my day, as if it was a reminder that my life is one series of rude interruptions and missed opportunities.
It is as if I wake up and say to myself, “Yes, this is the extent of my life – waking up before I want to and dragging myself to places I don’t want to go.”
It doesn’t help when my employment is not always 100% fulfilling. It doesn’t help when I drag myself out of bed and look ahead to the day’s schedule and see things that do not excite me.
But, even if it isn’t exciting it is most certainly not reason to mope and mourn. It is not reason to condemn myself to misery for the rest of my life, which is more or less the attitude that I have assumed on certain mornings.
Yes, fulfilling and challenging work goes a long way in helping those feelings, but I have begun to think that these things are actually a gift that I had never recognized. They are a gift in that they can help me to learn something. They are a gift in the way that they can make me stronger.
The New Testament writer James had this to say, “whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.”
Hmmm, those are very wise words, but actually extremely difficult to put into action. It’s very easy to look at those words and to say, “That’s so true. What an amazing way to look at trouble.” But to actually look at the difficulties of our lives and to consider it nothing but joy is a whole other level of mind changing. If you take an example and imagine what it would look like to follow James’ advice, the words suddenly seem a little batty.
But I think it’s the underlying mindset that is really the key to making such a bizarre attitude even remotely possible, and that is the attitude of trying to become a complete person – mature and lacking in nothing.
That’s not how I think most of the time. I certainly care about self improvement. I want to be a better person and I work on that in different ways, but I can’t say that it’s the underlying attitude that informs how I see and understand everything that happens to me.
As I think about and write about this slow search of mine, my take on it is changing as I make my way. I am realizing that it is not just a place of joy that I am looking for, it is also the kind of person who can recognize and feel the joy that I am looking to become.
Getting out of bed is a small thing, but on those hard mornings, when regret at breaking my slumber begins to wash over me, I will try to think of James and how maybe this is not just an example of my imperfect life, but an opportunity to grow stronger and to get better within that imperfect life.
