I used to love the snooze button. It was my early morning friend, allowing me a few extra minutes to enjoy the comfort of a warm bed before launching into a busy day. My daughter helped break my snooze-button habit for a short while. As a baby, she was up all hours of the night and morning. It was a glorious day when she finally learned to sleep past five. After that, mornings were blissful.

Until my son came along. He’s the enhanced model of the “Alarm Clock No Snooze” system. With him, there’s no in between. In a matter of seconds, he shifts from deep sleep to extreme awake. And once he’s up, I have no choice but to get up with him or there’s no telling what he’ll get into.

As for my daughter, she’s now progressed to where she claims to be “allergic of” getting up. To make things easier, I try to sing her awake. She opens her eyes. She smiles, she giggles. But still, she’s under the covers, comfy and on the verge of returning to dreamland. She’s awake, but she’s not up.

Observing my kids’ morning habits makes me realize a deeper reality. There’s a difference between waking up and getting up.

We hear about school shootings, terrorism, gang violence, racist acts, and more on a daily basis. The increasing amount of disturbing news has served as a wake up call to multitudes. Something’s wrong, and something needs to change. If we don’t deal with the root of the issues before us, things will only get worse.

The problem is, we’re awake, but we’re still in bed. We’re awake, but we’re not getting up. We’re aware that our world is in turmoil, but we’re still comfy under the covers. We’ve responded to the wake up call, but we haven’t heard the get up call just yet. It’s quite possible we’ve become “allergic of” getting up.

Waking up involves opening our eyes and ears. But we still haven’t moved from a position of comfort. Getting up requires action. It requires moving our feet and stepping away from our place of comfort and into the realm of movement.

We’ve come to the point in our lives when it’s not enough to wake up anymore. It’s time to get up. It’s time to do something. And that something begins with change, and the change begins with us.

What’s one of the first things we do when we get up? We look in the mirror. We see what needs to change, and we change it. In this case, the change begins in our hearts once we finally hear the get up call.