Answer

What Does It Mean to Be Spiritually "Awake"?

The word has been pulled into politics, and that makes the scriptural version hard to hear. If you have heard “awake” used as an insult or a badge, it is worth setting that aside long enough to see what the prophets meant by it.

Being awake means noticing where your life is actually heading while there is still time to turn. It is the opposite of drifting, and drifting rarely feels like anything at the time. Two pilots once fell asleep over the Pacific with the autopilot on and overflew their destination by miles. Nothing dramatic happened while they slept. That is the whole point of the word.

Eternal Truths

Scripture uses “awake” as a call to see and then to act. Lehi pleaded with his sons to awake from a deep sleep, to arise from the dust and be men (2 Nephi 1:13-14, 21). Paul said the same thing to the Saints: awake thou that sleepest, and Christ shall give thee light (Ephesians 5:14-16). In both cases the waking is followed immediately by something to do.

Awake is about direction, not alarm. The Lord told His people to be anxiously engaged in a good cause and to do many things of their own free will rather than waiting to be commanded (Doctrine and Covenants 58:26-28). Discernment that changes nothing is just a better-informed sleep.

The things worth waking to are usually close to home. The Family: A Proclamation to the World describes the family as the unit where the most consequential drift happens, and where attention pays the most. A marriage, a testimony or a relationship with a child can drift for years before anyone names it.

What Can Make This Confusing?

“Woke” now means something political, and it means different things depending on who is saying it. That makes the scriptural word sound like it is taking a side. The older sense is narrower and much less exciting: to be roused to see something true that you had stopped noticing.

Questions to Think About

• What in my life has been drifting long enough that I stopped seeing it?
• If I were choosing my week deliberately, would it look like this one?
• What have I already noticed and not acted on?

What You Can Do

Take twenty minutes this week and write down where four things are actually heading: your relationship with God, your closest family relationship, your work, and what you do with your spare hours. Not where you intend them to go. Where they are going. Then change one of them by one degree. The essay behind this answer sets the word in its scriptural context.

Jesus Christ can wake a person without shaming them, and He gives light to those who get up rather than a lecture about how long they slept.