The Morning That Starts Before I Do

Every message about mornings assumes a room.

A quiet one, with a chair in it, and a person who arrives at that room under their own power at a time of their choosing.

I want to talk to the people for whom that room does not exist.

In your house, somebody else starts the day. A small child, most likely. Or a person who needs help getting up. Or a shift that begins before there is any such thing as a morning. Whatever it is, the day is already in motion when you become conscious, and you enter it at a run because it is already going.

And you have read the messages about first things, and you have quietly concluded that this particular teaching is for people whose lives are shaped differently from yours.

I want to argue with that conclusion, and I am not going to do it by suggesting you get up earlier, because in your house getting up earlier means less sleep and no more quiet.

I am going to do it by looking at where David actually was.

He was not in a quiet room

Psalm 63 has a line about the morning that people put on cards.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. (Psalm 63:1)

Now read the heading of that psalm, which is part of the text.

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

He is not in a room. He is in a desert, most likely running from Absalom, with an army somewhere behind him and his own son leading it. The words dry and thirsty land are not a metaphor about his soul. They are a description of where he is standing.

So the most quoted verse about seeking God early was written by a man with no quiet place, no routine, no chair, and no reasonable expectation of an undisturbed morning.

You are not disqualified by your circumstances, and the verse was never written from the kind of room you do not have. Psalm 63:1 comes out of a wilderness with an army in it rather than out of a study, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in somebody who has decided this teaching belongs to other people.

I want to sit on that a moment longer, because it is the whole message.

The word early in that verse is doing something more than clock time. It carries the sense of earnestness, of turning toward something first in priority as much as first in the hour. The seeking is early because it comes before other things in importance, and David demonstrates that by seeking in the least suitable place available.

You have a kind of early that has nothing to do with a clock, and it was never measured by the hour on it. Psalm 63:1 puts the seeking first in a place that offered no good hour at all. The Spirit of God is the one who can move a person from waiting for conditions to using the ones they have.

Inside the first thing, not before it

So here is what I want to hand you, and it is designed for a house like yours rather than adapted to it.

Four minutes before the first demand is not going to happen. Fine. The demand is a person you love and I am not going to ask you to make them wait.

Say one line to God while it is happening.

Lifting a child. Getting somebody dressed. Filling a bottle, finding a shoe, answering the same question for the fourth time.

Lord, this day is Yours. I am Yours. Here we go.

That is not a compromise version of a quiet time. Look at Psalm 63 again. That verse was composed by a man in flight. There is no version of that psalm that happened in ideal conditions, and it is one of the most loved things in the book.

You are able to seek Him inside the work rather than before it, and it was always going to count. Psalm 63:1 has a man seeking early in a dry land with no water in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a sentence said while somebody is putting a child's shoe on.

Why this is not second best

I want to address the obvious objection, because I would be raising it.

It sounds like a consolation prize. A proper morning for people who can have one, and a line said over a bottle for the rest of us.

Here is why I do not think that is right.

The reason a quiet morning is valuable is that it points a person at God before anything else does. That is the function. And a line said while lifting a child performs the exact same function, at the exact same moment in the day, with the same result.

What it does not have is the atmosphere. The atmosphere is lovely and the atmosphere is not the mechanism, and confusing the two is how people with full houses conclude that this is not for them.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. (Proverbs 3:6)

In all thy ways. Not in the quiet ones.

You have every one of your ways available for this, and none of them was ever excluded. Proverbs 3:6 says in all thy ways rather than in the still ones. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary busy motion into a place where somebody is acknowledged.