What does your morning look like? Do you typically sleepwalk through the same routine seven days a week? Does the alarm on your iPhone go off for over an hour before you finally throw off the covers? Are you up every morning at 7:30 but not really awake until 11:30?

Maybe you should try waking up to something different. Maybe you should try waking up like Rick from “The Walking Dead”. 

In the first episode of “The Walking Dead”, a routine traffic check goes awry and Officer Rick Grimes is shot. The next time we see Rick, he’s waking up from a coma in an Atlanta hospital.

The problem is he’s the only person left in the hospital. In the indeterminate time since Rick has been shot, the world has become overrun with zombies. The walking dead have taken over the hospital and the world around him.

There is no time to waste when Rick wakes up. His life is in danger. His family is missing. There is no time to fool around with the snooze button. There is no time to procrastinate.

Ok, so you don’t have the luxury of the zombie apocalypse to motivate you with purpose every morning. But you can live like your life is on the line every morning. Because it is.

And it’s not just your life on the line every day. Just like on “The Walking Dead”, the lives of others around you are on the line too.

There is no time to waste. You should wake up every day like an action hero, knowing your mission in this world is to save many lives. You may not be attacked by walkers at any minute, but your time in this world and your opportunities are slipping away every moment.

You can wake up each day with a purpose. All you need to do is have the perspective of Esther.

Esther was just your average Jewish woman who happened to become Queen through a series of fortunate events. Life was going great until her husband signed a decree ordering the extermination of all the Jewish people.

Esther’s husband did not realize his wife was Jewish as she hid her heritage from him. She knew she had to do something, but she was scared. She wanted to hit the snooze button on life. She wanted to pretend her life was not on the line, until her cousin Mordecai shook the sleep off her eyes:

Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape more than the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13-14)

Esther knew it was time to wake up. She decided from that moment on to live with a purpose. She set about to save her people. Esther declared, “If I perish, I perish.” She saw the stakes were life and death, and willingly put her life on the line for her people.

Every morning God wants to disturb you from your slumber. He wants to disturb you from your complacency. He wants to wake you up from the dream that everything is fine, that you have any time to waste.

God wants you to wake up like Rick Grimes. He wants you to wake up like an action hero. He wants you to live like you were made for such a time as this – because you were.

Wake up tomorrow with a purpose – to save many lives.

Do you struggle with waking up every morning? What sort of habits and patterns do you fall into every morning? What do you think God put you on this earth for? Leave a comment below and join the conversation: