Isaiah 30:18 Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! 19 O people of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. 20 Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. 21 Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” 22 Then you will defile your idols overlaid with silver and your images covered with gold; you will throw them away like a menstrual cloth and say to them, “Away with you!” 23 He will also send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes from the land will be rich and plentiful. In that day your cattle will graze in broad meadows. 24 The oxen and donkeys that work the soil will eat fodder and mash, spread out with fork and shovel. 25 In the day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, streams of water will flow on every high mountain and every lofty hill. 26 The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.

When we wake up and realize that our ways are not working, then we will begin to see and hear God clearly. It’s at the moment that we become aware, for that is what being conscious means, that life is not about self, then our life will grow in richness and depth. In fact, just as the scripture above tells us there will be abundant life.

Jesus said, John 10:10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

Therein lies a key to stop living as a gerbil on a wheel and actually do something with our lives. Actual conscious living, living our life on purpose with purpose, means to stop trying to outrun our pursuer but rather to recognize his schemes and get off the wheel. We must quit waiting until our lives are perfect to serve the one and only true living God. We need to stop caring about what others think and get authentically real with ourselves to fix those things that need fixing. We have to stop running from our problems, face them, fix them, and move on to the things that are truly important. The bible calls these things the weightier matters. We never get past the children’s play if we can’t get real and see the world for what it is and then to see our lives with Christ as it really is.

Abundant life means we don’t concern ourselves with our neighbor for the sure pleasure of gossip but rather we concern ourselves with their betterment. We don’t judge them or think we have all the answers but instead we serve them. We do these things because we want to see our nations healed and moving forward, rather than just being out for ourselves and what we can get.

What would submission to one another truly look like? What would it do for our lives to walk only where God said, “This is the way; walk in it”? I think we’d quickly find that joy and health and true prosperity of the soul would return. What a heavy, heavy price we’ve paid for being unconscious.