4:10 am.
The clock blinks it bright and the alarm blares it loud, and it's entirely too early for normal human beings to leave their tangled blankets and face the not-yet-lit world.
Fifty questions.
The top of the test says it, and life will ask many more questions -- many harder questions -- than these fifty, but somehow those fifty small questions claim hours upon hours of life in preparation for their asking.
Seven days.
The turning of the planner pages taunts that it's been a week -- one hundred and sixty-eight hours, ten thousand and eighty minutes, six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds -- and it's Sunday again and the Bible is still in the same bag it was put in for church last Sunday.
But you can't just jump back into it, can you?
After you've let the busyness spin your sanity further out of reach than it normally is, after morning devotionals are missed more often than they're not, after prayer stagnates -- can you just start back up?
Don't you need some sort of powerful revelation? A "come-to-Jesus" moment, as it were, a really good worship song, a rock-bottom breakdown?
As though somehow I'd "lost" Jesus, misplaced Him, stuck Him in a dusty corner where He needs to be coddled to come out.
But where do I start?
When you've read the entire Bible cover-to-cover more than once, how do you remind yourself that this isn't a normal book, that the words are alive and are life, that the thousandth time you read it is the thousandth time that piece of truth is pressed into your soul -- and that no matter how well you think you know it, you desperately need it pressed in just one more time?
How do you convince yourself that this is one Book in the world you can open anywhere, no matter where you left off, no matter how many times you've read that part or not read it? How do you teach yourself to not feel guilty for loving some parts a little harder, clinging to some portions a little more strongly than the others?
But does He still remember me?
Have I become less of a Christian? Is there such a thing? Do I need to start over, re-pray "the prayer," "rededicate," walk down the proverbial aisle once more?
Can He whose love is fiercer than death have His love shaken by my closed Bible?
Never.
Perhaps I remember it a little less, but if neither death nor life, angels nor demons, present nor future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation can separate us, somehow I don't think my faltering devotionals breaks that bond.
4:00 am.
If that's what it takes.
One question.
Where do your priorities lie?
Seven days.
Each one a chance to start over, without having to go back to square one.
