Definition:  Having become conscious or aware of something. Roused from sleep.

Remember that Robert DeNiro/Robin Williams movie, “Awakenings,” where the DeNiro character awakens from his catatonic state through a certain medication? I feel I’ve “awoken” in recent years, not from catatonia, but from getting things wrong.

Maybe because of my firstborn status, my achiever style (Enneagram 3), some wrong teaching, (actually all three), I grew up feeling I couldn’t ever quite measure up. And that was the first thing I got wrong. A few years ago, I chose to wake up, accept myself as I am, put my missteps behind me, and let the chips fall wherever they would. It was a reckoning, a risk worth taking. Why was accepting love from God, the kind that isn’t earned, so hard?

Here’s thing #2 I got wrong. It was my “bad people” list. The people on my list weren’t on Jesus’s list. What an awakening! He’s not fond of the legalistic and hypocritical but he pursues outsiders, those who misunderstand him and look for love in all the wrong places.

I think a deepening occurs when you let go of legalism and embrace grace.

Thing #3 was that I felt I had to carry the world on my shoulders. I always got a kick out of the name of the Catholic church in Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” – Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Ha! Anyway, I think there’s a balance in life and I was off-balance. I still am at times. Maybe we all get too this-or-that at times and need some re-awakening.

Awakening is remarkably freeing, but it does have some risk.

You change.