Don't get caught sleeping

Reflection

Spiritual drowsiness is an old theme in scripture. Jesus asks his disciples in Gethsemane whether they could not stay awake with him one hour (Matthew 26:40), and Paul urges believers not to sleep as others do but to stay alert and sober (1 Thessalonians 5:6). The warning is not really about physical tiredness but about the slow drift that happens when faith stops being tended: attention wanders, priorities shift, and a person can drift a long way before noticing. Staying spiritually awake does not mean constant intensity or anxious vigilance. It means paying attention: to conscience, to scripture, to the quiet nudges that get easier to ignore the longer they are ignored. Being caught sleeping, in the biblical sense, is being unprepared when it matters, whether that is a moment of temptation, a moment of testing, or simply the ordinary passage of years. The remedy is not fear but faithfulness in small, repeated choices.

Questions to sit with

• What usually causes your spiritual attention to drift?
• Is there a habit you have let slip that once kept you alert to God?
• What would waking up spiritually look like for you this week?

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