1464 Wake Up Little Robot

Wednesday. It’s the middle of the week. The 13th of September, the middle of the month. We’re just in the middle. In the middle of what we started but has not yet ended. Nobody likes the middle. Let’s get to the end already! The hardest years of marriage are said to be years 7 and 8. This is the time frame of more divorces than any other. These years are labeled “high risk” for marriage. You’ve heard of the 7 year itch, yeah, you’re itching to get divorced! You’re not the “new couple” anymore, but you’re not the “old couple” that have been together so long you start to look like each other. You’re in the middle. You’re high risk and you’re itchy. Just like life. In the middle of what we started but has not yet ended. That whole mid-life crisis thing can be real. We get a little lost in the middle. Purpose becomes blurry. Energy dips. We begin to question what’s the point in what we’re doing. Is it worth it? The week has been rough, why keep trying so hard? The month hasn’t been perfect, what’s the point in all this effort if it’s not making a drastic difference? He’s not giving you the warm fuzzies any more and you don’t want to spend the rest of your life feeling cold. And to top it all off, you look in the mirror and you see everything just getting worse. Hairs grow overnight in places they shouldn’t be. How is it fair that you’re still getting pimples like a teenager, while your skin is wrinkling like an old woman? That’s not fair. Hey, life isn’t fair. You’re here one day and you’re gone the next. But you’re here today, so what are you going to do with this? Yes, this middle. That’s where you are, in the middle. The part where it’s easy to lose hope, lose focus, and settle for less than what life could be. You don’t have to be miserable here. The world wants to enslave you in miserable routines that suck the life out of you and keep you stuck in doing the same pointless things out of habit. The world will make your eyes glaze over with boring repetitiveness that says “Yay, it’s Friday. Boo, the weekend was too short. Oh no, Monday is coming. Blehhhh, it’s just Wednesday.” We’re just showing up each day as little slaves knowing we don’t get excited over Wednesdays. We don’t get our hopes up for change in the middle of the month. We just try not to kill the person we vowed to love for the rest of our days in those high risk years. And we’re not getting any younger here so things are only getting worse. Isn’t life more than this? Isn’t this day, yes, this Wednesday, of greater value than the unimpressive middle position we give it as if it holds nothing worth waking up for? This is the day the Lord has made, have we forgotten to rejoice and be glad in it? Today, you will experience once-in-a-lifetime moments. Things that will never, ever happen again will unfold right in front of you. But will you be so busy dragging around the chains of the “middle” that you never even look up? Chains. Yes, chains. Routines. Habits. To do lists. Have to go there, have to do that. Punch the clock. Check the box. Wish it all away so you can plop yourself on the couch at the end of the day and zone out. Slaves. Girls, we have somehow taken this miraculous thing called life, and we’ve become slaves in it. We’re here, but we’re not really here. We’re alive, but we’re not really living. 1 Corinthians 7:23, “God paid a high price for you, so don’t be enslaved by the world.” You know what modern day slaves look like? Robots. Robots that do, but don’t think. Robots that move, but don’t live. Robots that work, but don’t enjoy. We are the robots. The slaves. I wonder if we were to watch a high speed video of ourselves living this entire day of life, what would we see? Would we like what we see? Or would we be embarrassed? Would we look like little miserable slaves zipping from one thing to the next, heads down, missing out. You know how time lapse videos show the mo