Mark 1:35

Mark 1:35

“And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed.”

Its pretty well known that I don’t like mornings. My poor family had to deal with it for almost 18 years as each morning I would wake up and glare at anyone who tried to have a conversation with me. My mom once told me that everyone had decided to not talk to me for the first hour after I came out of my room. Yikes. Honestly, it’s the dumbest thing. I mean, what reason do I really have to wake up and immediately be mad? The Lord’s mercies are new every morning and that alone is reason to have a good attitude about being awake. But if I’m being totally honest, I think the biggest reason why I hated mornings so much was because of their focus on me. I didn’t want to wake up, so I snoozed my alarm as many times as possible. I didn’t want to face the responsibilities of that day so I stayed in bed until I absolutely could not avoid getting up. I didn’t want to be real with people so I used social media as a way of escape before I even got out of bed. The list could go on, but that’d be boring. My point is that my mornings were so filled with self that I could never just enjoy the life the Lord gave me. The joy I should have had wasn’t there simply because my eyes were on myself and not my Lord. Doing a devo every day was a habit before Ignite, but it was never ever done early in the morning. Ever. And considering that in my house, 7 people live together, “desolate place” is a foreign concept to me. No matter which room you’re in, at least one other person could walk in at any second. However, since being in Ignite, the Lord has been changing my heart towards mornings. While I still don’t like them and would rather start my day later, I now see value in being up early in order to spend time with the Lord. For any reason other than being with Jesus, I still think being up early is dumb. But like I said, there is value in waking up to spend time with the Lord before your day starts and the benefits of that far outweigh the cost of losing some sleep.