Blog 2779 – 06.08.2023

You Snooze, You Lose

It is an old story how focusing on what we don’t want, avoiding responsibility for our current situation, and sleeping through life like it was just a bad dream can cause us to miss-out on countless opportunities to make our lives and those around us better, brighter, and more fulfilling. Now there is a run-on sentence that needs considerable unpacking.

Rip Van Winkle is the story of a man unhappy with his wife, his job, his life in general, who preferred hunting, fishing, and solitude. On one of his long walks in the woods he came across a gang of like-minded avoiders and fun seekers and after a few drinks and a few games of bowling he took a long nap that lasted twenty years. When he finally awoke he had a long gray beard and all the world had changed around him.

Long before that nap he had been asleep at the switch so to speak, just coasting through his life, living what he believed was a life of quiet desperation, and seeking an easy way out. Life is meant to be good and if it is not, nine times out of ten, the real culprit is us. Or as comic strip Pogo put it so simply, “We have discovered the enemy and it is us.”

The Bible says, “Awake, O sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will give you light.” Not a Christian? Me either, but the lesson here is bigger than one narrow religious interpretation. Christ is not Jesus of Nazareth’s last name, as some may think, but a title that means child of God and it is a title that applies to us all. Ole Rip allowed the cares of this life and the deceitfulness of riches to rob him of the sure and certain knowledge of Who and Whose he and we all are.

That ole snake in the grass, Satan (the accuser of the brethren), Adam and Eve’s first creation, more aptly named Ego, would have us believe that we are orphans, strangers in a strange land, ever discouraging us to “just sleep through it or sleep it off.” I looks like I have ended as I began with a long run-on sentence. Here’s a short one for you, forever true. “You snooze, you lose.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bKJb8ykRdClO-VffnHHV77Dq2jAy3rG/view?usp=drivesdk

Rip Van Winkle

Author’s Note: A dear boyhood friend and long time classmate, Larry Pardue, recently died. He will be missed and mourned by all fortunate enough to have met and known him in this life. As Jesus said if his cousin John, “We were happy to rejoice in his light for awhile.”