I heartily believe that there are morning people and not-morning people. Or maybe it is “morning not-people,” because they just don’t feel human when they get out of bed. I think that, to some degree, we come wired to be one or the other. Many people who are not naturally inclined to spring out of bed in the morning struggle along just fine before children. A job propels them into clothes and shoes and often a coffee shop. By the time they must engage with the public, they are ready to fake a smile and put their best faces forward.
Motherhood mornings are an entirely different struggle. On mornings when mom is home and children are home and no one else is watching, the default tends to be T-shirts and yoga pants, a messy bun, and an unbridled grumpy disposition until morning shifts into the reasonableness of the day. This grumpy morning rhythm perpetuates itself because “if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy.”
In both scenarios, there is an absence of genuine joy — a missed opportunity to greet the day with gladness and to set oneself upon a path of joyful sanity and sanctity.
There is an antidote to morning misery. There is a way to choose joy. First, choose gratitude. Better than that, choose to practice gratitude. Begin your day with thanks, even if it’s just thanks for the chance to begin again. Gratitude begins with an awareness of God’s unique fingerprint on your particular life. It’s a noticing of goodness that is not borne of looking around and comparing to someone else’s goods. C. S. Lewis once admonished that we have an inclination to “reject the good that God offers us because, at the moment, we expected some other good.” We want to write our own scripts, so we fail to read the beautiful story God is writing for us in the morning of each new day. Read his script and give thanks for it. Refuse to let your struggles and your unmet desires blind you to his goodness and his generosity. Joy will fail to take root in the presence of stubborn ungratefulness. First thing in the morning, notice the goodness of God and take a moment to articulate it and give thanks, even if it’s just a quick, whispered prayer.
Be present. Don’t borrow trouble or worry or regret. Stay firmly rooted in the present. One way to do this literally, especially in summer, is to take a few minutes to walk outside barefoot in the early light, even if only in your backyard or your front porch. Use your body to connect in a tangible way to the here and now. We are not just souls or intellects; we are living, breathing, moving bodies designed to worship God with our whole beings. So, take care not to miss today. Be fully in this present moment. Don’t regret the past and waste time ruminating on an impossible do-over. Don’t fret over the future and give time and energy to the things you cannot know. Embrace today with the resolve to surrender it to the will of God and to trust in his goodness. And notice the morning light while you’re at it.
Choose joy. It sounds overly simplistic and very cliche, but joy is a choice, so choose it. Over a lifetime, if we allow ourselves to stay in step with God, we learn that there are blessings to be found even in the sorrows — maybe especially in the sorrows. It’s not just those who are naturally inclined to spring out of bed with a smile who can see the blessings of a burden; it’s the people who set about seeking them purposefully. Look for the blessing. Name it. It’s in the valleys while we shoulder the burdens that faith is truly forged. When life is hard, we need to deliberately fill our minds with the truth God offers. That means you open your Bible. See his promises. Read about the ways that God has cared for the people in the valley throughout the history of mankind. Bury his consolations in the depth of your heart and let him live there. This isn’t denial. It is truth — clear truth, full truth, healthy truth.
Filling our souls with God — with gratitude for his gifts, with recognition of his presence in the world around us, with joy for his goodness, and peace knowing he has a plan — is the path to living a life worth getting out of bed for. It is a wholehearted, wholly sane life. It is a life united with the creator that yields genuine joy.
It is holiness.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
