Good Morning

There are people who love snooze buttons and people who don’t. There’s rolling back up in the warm covers for seven more minutes of blessed sleep or throwing them back and marching into the day.

But is there a better way to do morning wake up?

I read Tish Warren’s book, The Liturgy of the Ordinary, last spring and she encourages a gentler way to start the day. She begins with a chapter titled “Waking” and in that very first chapter she had me.

She suggests that before I untangle from the sheets, in the moment of waking, between the fog of sleep and awareness of the day ahead, I should stop. Stop and remember that I am God’s beloved. Before I wake to become a wife or a quilter or a grandma—who I truly am is beloved by God.

Jesus at His baptism, the beginning of His ministry—before He had changed the water to wine or healed the sick or was crucified and resurrected—was called by God His Beloved Son. And so as we begin a new day, we are also His beloved.

So I’ve changed my morning habits. Before I check my phone, plan the to-do list and launch into the day full speed, I want to linger under the covers and remember who I am as God’s beloved. And I want to thank Him and honor Him and ask for His help in the particulars of this day. 

I’ve found that so many before me have started their days in remembrance of God.

George Mueller set as his primary morning goal to “have my soul happy in the Lord.” 

C.S. Lewis was more specific: “The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”

Brother Lawrence, who was known for his communion with God all through his quiet days, wrote: “He does not ask much of us—an occasional remembrance, a small act of worship, now to heed his grace . . . lift your heart towards him. The smallest remembrance will always please him. It is not needful at such times to cry out loud. He is nearer to us than we think.” 

So, I’m trying to wake with this nearness of God in mind, to lie in the quiet of those first early moments and remember that I am God’s beloved. He is what’s true and real and eternal in all that is ahead in my day, and He will see me, His beloved, through it all.