The Early Morning Gap

There is a seemingly great divide between who I am and who I want to be.  But the Savior of my Life is narrowing that great divide and will one day make me gapless.  Fulfilling His purpose for me.  He promised.

A few months ago, I came across this e-book about how making the most of my time in the morning will help me parent more intentionally and be more purposeful in my day.  It was an accident, really.  I happened upon it one day while I was blog-surfing.  You know -- following links, tracking down blogs I'd like to follow.  It was my current flavor-du-jour for wasting my time spending my free time.  I'm sure there was something else I should've been doing and wasn't.  (A whole 'nother gap.  Whole different post.  Entirely different day.)  But alas, I was not.  Doing whatever I needed to do, that is.

The topic of the book intrigued me because, simply put, I. am. not. a. morning. person.  Always wanted to be.  Never have been.  So I downloaded the free e-book and read it the next day.

Inspired, I tried to figure out how a morning routine might work in my life.  Exactly what it might look like.  Because I've long admired those women who get up early and not only spend time alone with the Creator of the Morning, but they somehow workout, shower, do the laundry, scrub the floors and put dinner in the crockpot all before 7am.  Admittedly, my perspective might be a bit skewed and rather unrealistic, but I have long dreamed of being that woman.  The problem was the gap.  The gap between my dream of being Mrs. Morning and my reality of not wanting to see the numbers 5:00 more than one time per day.  So I shelved the inspiration from the book in my internal filing system (i.e. my brain), and continued on with my current daily routine.  This included, but was not limited to, ignoring my daughter for the half-hour between my husband leaving for work and the alarm going off at the last possible minute in order to get her ready for school on time.  In other words, good book.  Inspiring even.  But that's where it stopped.  (Do you see the GAP?)

Soon after I read the book, though, the author, Kat, started this website as a follow-up for the e-book.  A practical way to inspire moms to more purposeful parenting.  It's God's answer to what I'd hoped my website might become when I started realifemom.com.  Amazing, really, because He is using my new friend Kat to inspire women to be the moms that God has called us to be in very practical ways.  She is definitely the right one for this job.  Without a doubt.  She's organized and seasoned, and blessed by God to share the truths that He has been teaching her as she mothers her own three children and leads her readers in purposeful living.  But let's return to my story, shall we?

We'll pick it up at the point where my pastor preached a sermon about idols.  And I realized that, in certain ways, sleep was my idol.  Not saying I don't need it.  I'm just saying I think I depended on it more than on the faith that God can get me up in the morning and fill me with more LIFE than any amount of sleep could ever give me.

So I gave up sleeping in for lent.  And I woke up by six a.m. almost every day for about six weeks.  And I spent my time reading God's Word and journaling.  And, although it was difficult to get out of bed most mornings, I started to love my alone time.  Which you would think would make me stick with it, right?  Yeah, me too.  But alas, here we are, seven and a half weeks past Easter, and I am back to my old habits.  Because, well, I do love my sleep.  Especially in the morning.

And, even though I know how worth it the sacrifice is, when morning comes and the light breaks through the curtains in my bedroom and onto my closed eyelids, I roll over and face the windowless wall.  So I can sleep some more.  I cling to the old and comfortable way that I have always known.

Funny how so many of us are like that. 

Like the Israelites whom God had freed from slavery.  When they got hungry, they just wanted to return to their old lives in Egyt.  Because it was all they knew.  Even though it meant returning to slavery. 

They said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? ... It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!" (Ex.14:11-12)

When it came down to it, the Egyptians decided that they would rather live in the comfort of what they knew than risk the discomfort of the unknown.  Even though that unknown meant life like they had never imagined.  Abundant living, in beautiful land that would produce amazing crops and flowing rivers and even more.  The truth of the matter was that the sacrifice of their immediate comfort would not even compare with the abundance of the life they would have.  If only they would put up with the discomfort for a little while.

And the truth of the matter for me is that the sacrifice of my immediate comfort (i.e. thirty more minutes of morning sleep) does not even compare with the joy and peace of starting my day on the right note (i.e. alone with the Creator of my life).

What comfort do keep running back to, even though you know it's worth sacrificing for something truly better?