How To Successfully Navigate Life Series

How many of you out there have ever had any experience with sleep-walking?

I imagine we could all share some interesting stories about our sleep-walking experiences. But since I’ve got the floor this morning, you get to hear about mine.

I have actually walked in my sleep only about three times in my life—all three of those occasions coming within the same week while I was 19. I only remember the specifics of two of those occasions, and only one was very eventful. It’s relevant to our topic this morning—how to successfully navigate your way through life—because it is a great illustration of dangers of trying to get some place or go somewhere when you’re completely in the dark. With sleep walking, you’re either completely in the dark because, 1.) your eyes are closed; 2.) you’re unconscious or 3.) it’s very dark, because so often, when we’re sleeping, and therefore when we’re sleep-walking, it happens at night, when it’s dark.

All three were factors in my most memorable experience of sleep-walking. I was still living with my parents at the time. And I was asleep when somehow the thought occurred to me to get up. Somehow the thought of waking up first didn’t also occur. Because of my unconscious state, I didn’t realize at the time that I had slept on my right leg wrong, which had strangulated the blood flow to that leg, so that it was all tingly and was “asleep” in the sense that it had a very reduced circulation. And that was the leg I stuck out of bed that night to stand on. But as I brought that leg out from under the covers and onto the floor, now a third problem came into play. In my unconscious state, I somehow miscalculated the position of my foot in relationship to the floor. And as I touched my foot down, the foot was somehow roughly perpendicular to the floor with the result that some toes as they hit the floor wee pushed upward, and other floors were pushed downward and so they separated out from each other. At that point, of course, I began to place my weight directly over and on to my right leg, which as I had noted, was also “asleep” in the sense that it didn’t have adequate circulation, and at that point, the leg, and my entire body, collapsed on the incredibly awkwardly placed toes and foot below. All of this was happening in the dark, and of course, I was in the dark, being unconscious.

Now there is a sensation that is known to wake people up when they are asleep. It is called pain. And as I collapsed to the floor, the full weight of my body crushing down on a useless leg and awkwardly placed foot and toes, I experience great pain. That and the accompanying scream woke me up.

But the damage of trying to walk in the dark, while asleep, was not over. My mother, who saw me as her little baby from the day I was born until the day she died, had been sleeping across the hall in the master bedroom. My scream not only woke me, but it jolted her out of her sleep. And following her motherly instincts, my mom vaulted out of her bed into a sprinter’s crouch, and then launched herself full speed ahead in my direction.

The problem again was that it was in the dark. And an “as the crow flies” strategy isn’t always the best, especially in the dark. And so as she was filled with adrenalin and launched herself, she failed to take into account, due to the dark, that she was not quite appropriately stationed in front of the doorway. In fact, she was probably about a foot off. And so she, as you might imagine, she slammed into door jam with her shoulder and neck, sustaining painful injuries to her own body, before she eventually felt her way into my room and came to my rescue.

The problem was, of course, that each of us had attempted to make decisive moves while we were, in one sense or another, in the dark. It was only as she finally reached the bedroom to find me writing in pain on the floor that she actually supplied what we both desperately needed—she turned on the light.

Now we successfully navigated our way to the doctor’s office and ultimate healing that afternoon, and for the rest of the day after that, all because, from that point, we did things with the help of light. Because making decisive moves in the dark can be and often is a very, very dangerous thing.

And believe it or not that’s very much how it is with our spiritual life. The Bible tells us that the whole world dwells in darkness and there are a great many spiritual dangers, pitfalls, wrongs turns, broad paths that lead to destruction. And that we have absolutely no hope of finding our say through all these dangerous obstacles unless we turn to the light of God—the wisdom and direction, who as it turns out, is embodied in none other than the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, yes, Jesus of Nazareth.