It's midnight, and after a long crazy day of full throttle activity you finally crawl in bed. You're ready to sleep. Sleep sounds really good. So good. You settle in, and begin steering your consciousness toward dream land. Only there is a problem. It's not the blanket; those are just right. And it's not the temperature, noise level, or your pajamas. Everything seems perfect except for one thing...your pillow. For some reason your pillow just doesn't seem right. I mean, it's still your pillow. It feels like your pillow, smells like your pillow, and holds like your pillow, but something is off. Have you ever felt like that? You lay down at night ready to snooze, only you can't because your pillow just doesn't seem quite right. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm nuts. But it doesn't really matter how tired I am, when I lay down my pillow has to lay just the right way for my head to find all the correct familiar lumps. I need the right lumps to navigate me into the Land of Nod. The pitiful thing is that all of too often I will hit the bed, lay on the pillow and, even though I realize its not positioned to my optimum comfort level, I will try to ignore it. I tell myself that I can still sleep, that I am too tired to mess with it, that I can just ignore it and all will be ok. I am almost always wrong. If I sleep without moving it, I never rest as well as I could have. Or, if I do rest, I wake up with some minor ache in my neck from having my pillow out of sorts.
Perhaps that all sounds crazy. I may sound like some kind of obsessive compulsive pillow nut. That's not far from the truth. However, there is another truth in my rambling. Tragically, all too often people go through life dragging along some sinful something that they refuse to deal with. It is like their comfortable pillow. They know it has its lumps. They know that they may wake up wishing they had made a change, but they don't.
I believe that God wants more for His kids than to let us wrestle restlessly through life. He wants peace, and joy, and all of the other things that the Bible talks about that are fruits of His Spirit at work in us. Sadly, many people will not embrace the change that Christ offers. It's not a matter of you and I working it out. We don't earn it. We can't earn it. It's simply a matter of acknowledging our need for Him, wanting a change, believing Jesus made it possible, and embracing that belief. Discounting that is a lot like refusing to move the pillow, except the consequences are much worse than a bad night's rest.