Awakening the Soul
Spiritual numbness is subtle. Until it isn’t.
I woke up one day before Christmas with a sore right arm. Over the next two days, my forefinger and middle finger on my right hand went partially numb. Eventually, I was diagnosed with a pinched nerve and am currently receiving treatment.
The numbness came with some challenges.
Filling a pill dispenser with two numb fingers on your dominant hand isn’t easy. The first time I tried it, I dropped pills into the wrong section. And as I tried to fish them out, I couldn’t feel them and pulled more than one pill out.
Even typing on a keyboard feels awkward. I can’t feel the Y, H, N, U, J and M keys much at all. I’ve been typing since high school, so muscle reflex kicks in. But it still feels weird.
If you lost your sense of smell or taste after contracting COVID-19, then you know what I’m talking about. You expect a certain scent, taste, or in my case, sense of touch, and you get nothing. Your brain is expecting a certain experience, but it doesn’t happen.
The lyrics from the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb” come to mind. According to an interview in “Rolling Stone” twenty years ago, Roger Waters said the song was based on a “sleazy” Philadelphia doctor who injected him with tranquilizers before a gig when he was suffering from hepatitis. It put him in a state of being comfortably numb to the point that he could hardly lift his arm.
There’s a time and place to be comfortably numb, but never in a spiritual sense. That’s where my mind went when I thought about my physical numbness.
If you stop reading your Bible for any length of time, you won’t notice sins you would have fought against previously. You won’t so much as give up the fight as much as you will stop realizing you need to fight.
If you stop worshiping with the saints for a few weeks, you’ll find your heart less inclined toward God and more inclined toward football, food, or anything else you fill the day of worship with.
If you stop meeting with Christian friends for any length of time, your heart will grow cold spiritually because we need each other to fan the flame.
Spiritual numbness is subtle. Until it isn’t. One day you wake up and realize you’ve drifted out into the current and can no longer see land.
The danger is thinking we can shake ourselves awake – to flex the numbness from our souls. But self-reliance is what got us to that point in the first place.
That’s not to say we can’t do anything about it. We can step back into our spiritual rhythms. As we do, we will find Living Water there. And he’s the one who can revive us as we dip our hands into the water and drink freely.
Here are some tidbits you might find interesting this week:
There’s a village in New York that is filled with bookstores. How much fun would it be to spend a day there?
This article by Shauna Niequist is so good. A friend told her she was sad and wanted to go out to eat with Shauna and see a funny show. That led to a long walk, tears and laughter. Sounds like a great way to spend a day, doesn’t it?
How an elderly homeless man left a lasting impact on those who cared for him.
I’ve started compiling playlists on Spotify in which I add every song by a favorite artist to each list, then I listen from front to back to his or her entire catalog. You can hear subtle differences in their voices as they age. You can see subtle shifts in their style. And often, you can see a maturation process. It gives you a more complete picture of the artist, and it’s so much more satisfying then picking and choosing popular songs.
“Go to your rest rejoicing, for though art no desolate wanderer but a beloved child, watched over, cared for, supplied, and defended by your Lord.” -Spurgeon
When Lee isn’t writing essays, devotional books, or Christian fiction, he is a freelance editor, as well as a freelance journalist who has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. He’s also a fan of NASCAR, baseball, tennis, books, movies and coffee shops.
Lee, my agent, Kathy Helmers, recommended me to your Substack. Good to connect with you here! And thank you for this piece!