Saturday, October 2, 2010

We Keep Getting the Wake Up Calls But Are We Ever Going to Wake Up?

As I was watching the news last night I heard at least three stories that the news anchors described as “Wake Up Calls” and of course my critical thinking skills kicked in and asked the question, if we are receiving all of these “wake up calls,” when are we going to wake up? It begs the further question, are we ever going to wake up? Each passing tragedy and horrific event serves as a metaphorical alarm, and yet we seem to keep hitting the metaphorical snooze button. Poverty is at a record high; college students are being murdered just by being at a party; a college freshman commits suicide as a result of an invasion of his privacy; Osama Bin Laden can send audio and video tapes at will (without our technology being able to track him), and we have pastors and priests who cannot keep their hands off of young men (not to mention the one who wanted to burn the Quran). It’s as if we are all asleep and the wake up calls keeps coming and we keep refusing to wake up. We can be likened to Rip Van Winkle or the Disciples who could not stay awake when Jesus went to pray even after He gave them a wake up call.


If we do not wake up soon, we won’t have to worry about waking up as we will just drift or be forced into that eternal sleep. People are getting killed senselessly on a daily basis; our politicians do very little other than bicker and see who can find the most dirt on the other; and for the most part the church is perceived as being relatively quiet. The phrase “wake up call” is used so frequently that at this point it really is like the alarm going off every 10 minutes and one rolling over and hitting the snooze button each time it sounds off then falling back to sleep for another 10 minutes. As a world and a country we cannot afford to keep ignoring the wake up calls that we keep receiving. If we continue to do this, we will not only be asleep but we will continue to live a nightmare. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

2 comments:

Abigail-Madison Chase said...

I don't think people wake up until it hits them in the face. Then advocates emerge. Think of all the terror before 9/11 in the world. america cared but it was not us. Then we were hit and it became a real. Most things are not real until we are impacted we can't wake up until we are the ones hit.

Unknown said...

The thing is the wake up calls are coming at the eleventh hour and America is still asleep. Too much attention has been given to the negative, stinking, thinking people like Beck, Palin, Limbaugh and others. Instead of unifying as a nation to tackle these problems, we are divided with hatred and fear. And just as Joe McCarthy divided the country in the fifties with the fear of Communism, Beck and company are doing the same thing today. Only President Obama is the scapegoat. Jobs and manufacturing didn't disappear over night. It started in the eighties, when companies started outsourcing our labor. This country started the industrial revolution. Today, we have no more industry. When will America wake up? When there is nothing left to wake up to.