I woke up today all at once, feeling refreshed and completely awake. That hardly ever happens. I really noticed it, and then realized “This is the way I used to wake up every day when I was a child.” My body would take the sleep it needed and then without any alarm clock I would wake - alert, fresh, curious, and interested in the day before me.

These days, I usually don’t wake up that way. More often I stumble out of bed by necessity, sleepy, with a slight headache or backache. So I tend to hit the “snooze button” a few times before I finally, unwillingly, drag myself out of the cozy covers and into my day. But today was different. I woke perfectly.

I always like to look for the deeper meanings in things, in events, and thoughts - especially my first thoughts of the morning. What occurred to me then was how we human beings are called from the “sleep” of our habitual attitudes and actions of everyday life, to the higher awareness of possiblity, and our true identity and function as co-creators with God.

It seems to me that some people have “a perfect waking” all at once, sometimes when they are quite young, that calls them to a spiritual life. I guess those are the ones who become ministers, teachers, evangelists, and other kinds of declared, dedicated colleagues and coworkers with God. I’ve always envied them, because it seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do, and got a good start on their life work early.

The rest of us have a different destiny, a different calling, and it seems like we have to work harder to find it. And there must be lots of people like me, who may hear a quieter call many times without recognizing it, or maybe we’re afraid or reluctant to get up and go with it. So we hit the consciousness “snooze button” many times before we wake. And even then, we don’t wake fully, but vaguely aware of our divinity, stumble through another day, wondering, and just doing the best we can with whatever wisdom we have.

Today I had the Perfect Waking, physically. I don’t know if I will ever have that clear, bright, totally energizing kind of waking spiritually. Nevertheless, I do what I can do, and learn what I can learn, each day.

I think that most people are like me. We read about our divinity as sons and daughters of God / the Universe, and direct heirs of God’s knowledge and power to create, but we’re just not quite sure about it. “That can’t mean ME” we think, “I’m just me.” And then there are those human beings who go out and kill people and then claim “God told me to do it.” So there’s a lot of confusion for most of us who live in the world today and watch the 10 o’clock news. Should I trust my inner “still small voice” of God?

We can recognize our inner truth when we “hear” it, and we know when it is Spirit that is speaking. But yet we are still a little bit afraid to believe it and to trust it. For years I wondered “Who is it that speaks? Is it God? Is it Jesus? Is it an angel?” Finally I realized that these are not separate entities as we think of, here on earth. They are all Spirit. The voice of your heart, your inner Counselor, is the the messenger who speaks in the unique way that you can personally understand. That’s all I know. It can be trusted, insofar as you personally are able to trust.

Because of my childhood experiences, for much of my life I was very afraid to trust. I’m not afraid to trust God anymore, and I have begun to be able to trust myself, too. The Inner voice of Spirit never tells me to be or to do anything that could harm or hurt myself or anyone. That is not the nature of God; never was, and never will be.

I do listen, and I do act on the moments of wisdom I’m given. But I still keep hitting the snooze button of my consciousness quite a few times before I get up and get going to do what my soul knows is my work to do. I confess, I’m lazy, and not the most courageous person you know. Sometimes Spirit/God/the universe has to nudge me; sometimes it takes a solid shove, and there have been times when I needed a tough-love turnaround ...

I look at my life today and I can clearly see how far I’ve come, even though at the times I was making that forward progress I didn’t always consciously know I was doing it. Eventually I learned to let life happen instead of struggling to make it happen, and I just did whatever I could to help the things I wanted to happen, and let God/the universe do the rest. Something in the background that I couldn’t quite see, was moving me forward. Sometimes in spurts I was acutely aware of, and more often, in progress so slow that on the surface of things it was undetectable.

And yet I have come from there to here. The person I am is extraordinarily different from the person I was ten years ago. Not strictly “better” but much broader, deeper, wiser, kinder, and conscious at a deeper level than merely physical-mind conscious. I have reached beyond the point of realization that I am/we are a spiritual force lightly inhabiting a physical body and adventuring in a physical world.

This is heady stuff. This is a lot to encompass within a human life, within a human mind. But millions of us are doing this. Millions of ordinary people (not saints, not necessarily ministers or church leaders - just folks) are discovering and beginning to awarely practice a new kind of relationship with God. Not just God the father, God the master, but God the Source, God as a part of Self, and Self as a part of God. Some say our souls come here to learn and grow through human experience; some say God comes here in the form of us, to play. Either way, we are co-creators with God, and at the same time paradoxically, we are God expressing as us in the physical world.

We’re understanding at last that this is true, even though we cannot yet understand how this can be. Those who are learning concretely that this is so, are taking a new involvement in our lives, our circumstances, and our world.

To truly say “God expresses as me in this world” is to recognize too that God expresses as earthquakes and hurricanes, just as God expresses as the incredible sweet miracle of a newborn baby, a brand-new life. God expresses as the most powerful things and yet the most fragile too.

It’s a sunny, Indian-summer morning in late September, and I’m eager to see what the day will hold, and what it will bless me with. There is still so much I do not understand about this life, this world, my God, and eternity. But each new day, there is a little bit more, I do.