Sometimes Anna Sumner would go to bed in the evening and wake up a full day later. Her longest single stint of sleep was fifty-three hours.
At first, she didn’t recognize this as abnormal. In college, she just assumed her exhaustion was due to the stress of academic life. After graduation, Sumner moved to Bangkok to teach English. Napping between every class wasn’t odd, she thought, because she was adjusting to a warm climate. Then she spent a winter working in London. There, her excuse for long spells in bed was the dark and dreary sky.
Her craving for sleep impacted everything. She chose sleep over working out, eating lunch, or being with friends.
When she finally sought help, she found she had a rare condition: hypersomnolence. Anna’s brain had a “bioactive component” that shut the body down like it had been given anesthesia. Doctors began to give her a drug normally given for benzodiazepine overdoses, and for the first time in a long time she felt truly awake. It changed her life.
There’s such a thing as spiritual hypersomnolence. Like Anna’s condition, it’s impacting us in all kinds of negative ways. Yet, like Anna's condition, it takes a while for us to finally say, “This isn’t right.”
In the book of Revelation, Jesus dictated a letter to Christians in Sardis who were filled with compromise and complacency. “Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die,” he told his people. “If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you” (Revelation 3:2-3).
Notice how Jesus commanded us to awaken before faith dies.
We might think that spiritual complacency is some sort of neutral spot between passionate commitment or bitter rebellion. But no. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy lives by a slogan that Red comes to accept by the end: Get busy living or get busy dying. Those are your only two options, too: If you’re not busy living what you say you believe, Jesus says you’re dying.
If this is your wake-up call, don’t hit the snooze button!
--Tom
Sign up here to receive Tom Goodman’s weekly devotional in your email inbox. Tom serves as pastor at Hillcrest Church in Austin, Texas. His sermons are available on YouTube and the HillcrestToGo Podcast and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter.