Awake...

It's 3:00 a.m. and in three hours I have to be awake to get ready for the seventh day of a seven day work-week.

It's been months since I've been awake at this hour. Years since I've been awake at this hour for a worthy reason.

After work and staying up to watch the last seconds of Monday Night Football to make sure I landed a spot in the playoffs with my Fantasy Team, I decided to read a little bit more of "The Kite Runner" before I went to bed. I had read slowly and was only around page 225 when the clock struck midnight. I read a little, decided I needed sleep, put it down, turned off the light... five minutes later I had to read on. I did that several times until I decided to screw it. I'm going straight to page 372. The End.

I used to stay up late thinking about God. Time has assisted that habit into obscurity, unfortunately. The passions of youth awaken thoughts and desires and, well, passions that will not be settled by mere sleep. Although I preach the value of sleep, I regret that my life over the past 6-8 years did not provide cause for missing a little sleep.

But at thirty years and a few months I stayed up like a kid trying to squeeze the last bit of the day out of existence.

Get the book and read it. If, as is generally the case, you are not as moved by it as I am, that's ok. Often I give an endorsement of something and days later regret it because it didn't evoke the same emotions in others as it did in me. In those cases I generally think less of the person who didn't like whatever it was that I endorsed and question whether or not they understood what they read or watched.

But, this time I really don't care. All I know is that it is 3:18 a.m. now and my eyes are still red from the weeping the ending evoked in me. That Switchfoot line, about redemption having stories to tell.... I thought it was pretty stupid until now. I thought it was using two popular and powerful words in our culture, "redemption" and "story" , and raping them for dramatic effect. But after 372 pages, I understand about redemption telling stories.

I'll share a line from near the end then go to bed...

"...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unnanounced in the middle of the night."

______________________
Goodnight my friends. And good morning.