Living by reflex

While reading a friend of mine's blog today, he had this to say:

Occasionally, to use an inadequate parallel, it’s as if I’ve been going through the motions of my life fairly unquestioningly, when, in an instant, my predicament strikes me as amazing and strange [full text].

It's as if we've been living our lives by reflex rather than deliberation. If a reflex is an involuntary response, a command to the body that bypasses the conscious mind, what is its spiritual counterpart? A response that bypasses the Spirit?

I know this is in a different direction than he was going, but it reminds me of when I had a 30 minute commute to work each morning. I would get in the car, put the key in the ignition, and at my next conscious thought I was puling into the parking lot, with no specific memory of the actions that had brought me there. Occasionally though, something would happen on the trip that would snap me from my thoughtlessness, and I would actually see my surroundings. I have never noticed that graveyard before... when did they build that housing development... when did that gas station burn down?

Sadly, my spiritual life has this quality as well. There have been many weeks where I leave church, get into my car, and at my next thought of God, I am sitting in a pew again. Daily devotions help, but I've found that anything, even the Word of God, can become routine. And so, I've come to crave these moments of awakening, to depend on them. In the end, they remind me that revelation is not something we can choose to receive, that it is, in fact, the gift of God.