Friends,

Here is Common Christianity column #825 (9-6-22), “21 Years Ago.”  I hate getting up early but I love being up, and here is a tale of my life’s greatest wake-up call.  BTW, happy 35^th birthday (Sept. 5) to my elder son Eric in Utah.  Back in 8^th grade Eric asked, “Why don’t we go to church?”  And that’s why I was sitting in church that day 21 years ago (search the blog note at the end).

And now, the wake-up call.  God bless!  Bob

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Spirituality Column #825

September 6, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

21 Years Ago

By Bob Walters

“Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.” – Ephesians 5:14

In my retirement I drive a school bus out here in Fishers, Indiana USA.  On school days I’m up at a 6 a.m. alarm.

“School days,” when one has worked a normal civilian schedule for 30-plus years, are a happy blast from the past.  Weekends off, holidays off, school vacations off, summers off, and mini-celebrations on lucky snow days.  I never tire of snow days.

At the 6 a.m. alarm, sleep’s fog means I don’t always immediately know what day it is; I just know to get up, get going, and I’ll figure out the day soon enough.  I know my K-4 kids and their parents are looking for the bus at 7:13 a.m., and in my 10 years of answering that early alarm, I’ve yet to oversleep and miss an early route.

I have few fears in life, but oversleeping on a school day is one of them.

In my working vocation and career, I traveled a lot.  I was a sportswriter, then was in sports media relations, corporate communications, and various public relations enterprises in various places in Indiana, nationally, and abroad.  In those days, even when I had kids, it rarely registered when “school days” were.  My early morning challenge then was not just figuring the day of the week, but where in the world I was.

It’s easier now.  I wake up at home.  And while I really have never liked “getting up,” I treasure the accomplishment of “being up.”  On school days I get to see whatever sunrise God blesses Fishers with from the driver’s seat of a big yellow school bus.

Seeing the new light of day, the fresh but sleepy faces of wonderful school kids, and the relieved faces of parents as the bus loads and pulls away, is a mission.  An hour or so later I gather a squadron of slightly-more-awake and wonderful 5^th-8^th grade students. In the afternoon I take them all home.  Rinse and repeat; do it again tomorrow.

Our Fishers schools have already been in session for four and a half weeks, and Labor Day is our first “day off.”  I mention this because of all the days of awakening in my life (all of them so far – ha ha – and thankful for each one), the Sunday of Labor Day weekend annually is when I commemorate “waking up” to the reality of Jesus Christ.

It wasn’t like waking up for a work day, or a school bus.  It was waking up from an unknown slumber of absent purpose and undiscovered faith.  I was sitting in church looking for nothing, but suddenly, there it was: faith.  Despite the disorientation of not perceiving the new things I was seeing; confident light shined on truth I’d never known.

Sunday, September 2, 2001.  That’s my “Awake date” in Christ.  I knew almost nothing, as though waking up in a strange place.  It took days and months and years to learn about and understand this new life.  Jesus was real, the Spirit abided, and God loomed not as a threatening enforcer of things that were wrong about me, but as the coherent light of hope, goodness, and creativity that give life meaning, and forgiveness.

The Bible, previously an opaque mystery, became miraculously intelligible.  My faith family at East 91^st Street Christian Church formed and nurtured my Christian baby steps.  I was baptized November 18, 2001, marching onward to mature life with Christ.

I was lost, but now am found.  I was asleep, but now am awake.  I am alive.

Life is vibrant with the light of Jesus shining in it. Twenty-one years and counting.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) … search “awake” at his blog, CommonChristianity.