Wide Awake

It’s about 3.20 am in the morning and after hours of struggle to sleep, I decided to get up and write this post.

Many thoughts were in my head, both very disturbing and some new learning points, most of which I gathered after a few days of dry spirituality.

First of all, is of course the struggle to accept reality. It’s just something that I have constantly been battling with, sometimes I thought I have conquered it, sometimes it just made me crumble all the way down. There seemed to be no end to it. and I guess when I’m too confident of my own ability to handle it, it will come back and haunt me, reminding me that everything’s only by His Grace. In theory, it’s so easy to accept. But in reality, it’s strangely difficult. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just not my position to understand everything, maybe it’s just time for me to accept ‘blindly’ and move on. But, again, it’s never easy.

When Paul said “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” in Philippians 4. Present your requests to God. At first it sounded like, give to God once and for all, and you’re done. That must be the ideal case, because personally, it’s much more than that. It’s the daily struggling with thoughts that you knew you shouldn’t have, actual dreams that give false hopes, the sinful nature of yourself which allow me to compromise and indulge in those thoughts. And then realizing that it’s wrong, again and again, telling God to please control your thoughts because you can’t seem to do it anymore, to please let your mind focus on Him because you just don’t want to fall into the same sin again and again. But does praying that once made everything okay in an instant? No. It’s daily, crying and yearning for God to stay near when you felt yourself drifting away from Him and more and more into satan’s hand.

And secondly, when I struggled to sleep I always like to sing hymns to myself. This time I sang Be Thou My Vision because the lyrics happened to be just on top of my head. It’s funny how at times like this, a simple and well-known, maybe overly-sung hymn can give a new understanding to someone like me. It’s the sentence in the first verse where the words “Thou my best thought by day or by night” are. It’s as if God is saying, yeah, you keep thinking too much about your useless thoughts, your sins, your struggles but you forgot that the only solution is to think more of Christ. I thought I “go to God” in my struggles, but in fact, I was just wallowing myself in self-pity. How else can I have confidence in this fallen world, if not the confidence of the Cross?

And of course, I know it will be hard. VERY HARD. To keep telling myself that I want to follow God’s way. that I want no other joy than the joy from God. no other sunshine but the sunhine of His face. Especially in this fallen world where the temporary happiness are just too tempting, instant, and easy to achieve. But those are just driving me away from the real source of joy. I hope that this will be my constant prayer, and to know that I will only be satisfied by God:

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.”

Psalm 90:14

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