 I start my day, alternately at anywhere between 4:00 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. depending on how late I went to bed the night before. My preference is to rise earlier. The first thing I do, even before my feet are out of bed, is pray. Then I get up and do all the morning stuff you do - go to the washroom, get dressed, etc. Then I go and pray again - this time however it is far more focused - I pray for my struggles and for my family, for my church, and for all those temporal things that change week to week. It is this prayer time that usually sets the pace for the rest of the day. If I give it short shrift, I pay for it later in the same way a runner can run a race without warming up - they just aren't as "on their game" as if they warm up.
When my prayer time is over, I begin to read through the bible - starting at Genesis, and ending at Revelation, and starting all over again when I am done. I do that usually for about half an hour, moving my bookmark at the end of it. The next hour or so I like to read more topically - either studying one section, or perhaps reading from a variety of sources - prophets, psalms, proverbs, gospels, epistles, etc. If I am not finished this by 6:30 a.m. I wrap it up, because that is the time I spend in a bible study with my two older children (aged 7 and 9). I wake them up for the study and we read one chapter of scripture together, stopping pretty much everywhere to explain what is being said. We start by rehearsing what we read the day before, so as not to lose the context of what we read today - and we ask questions along the way and answer them. That usually lasts about half an hour. When we are finished our bible study, we break out our Biblical Greek assignments and for the next hour we study biblical Greek together, memorizing NT verses in Greek, working out grammar, and working on flashcards to keep our vocabulary sharp. The last 15 minutes or so are all used up by flashcards - so I use that time to take a quick shower, and change into my cycling clothes. At 8:00 a.m., or as close to that as I can manage - I get on my bike and cycle ten urban miles into work.
The Hebrews whom God had called out of bondage in Egypt - these he provided sustenance for by way of manna. Each morning God would provide, alongside the morning dew, manna from heaven to be gathered before the dew evaporated. The manna didn't hang around all day, it disappeared shortly after the rising of the sun (when the dew was gone, so too was the manna). Such that the whole camp rose every morning, early, to take in the manna that would feed them throughout that day. Each day they collected enough for that day, and no more - with the exception of Friday mornings, where they collected enough to provide for both Friday and Saturday (the Sabbath).
I see in this a good argument for being fed spiritually in the morning (as opposed to any other time). It strikes me as wise to make God our first priority, and let the rest of the day work itself out around -that- rather than the other way around. I feel so strongly about this, that I would not hesitate to leave a job that couldn't work around my schedule.
What say you? When do you feed on the Lord? I know we, all of us, throughout the day spend time in prayer, and perhaps we read Christian literature in the evening etc. I am not talking about the stuff that we all do, I am talking about when you give God your greatest time. For me, I am a manna, er, I mean morning man.Labels: devotionals, manna |
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