In the morning

My voice You shall hear in the morning, O LORD; In the morning I will direct it to You, And I will look up. – Psalm 5v3

I am a morning person. No matter what happens or how I feel I have a hard time having a ‘lie on.’ I sometime envy people who can sleep till all hours of the day. If I sleep till seven o’clock I feel like I have overslept.

But there is an advantage. When I get up the house is quiet. There is nothing going on. There is a wonderful stillness. Some mornings I just step outside and enjoy the quiet.

I have always tried to do my devotional time first thing in the morning. I normally make a cup of tea and a piece of toast. I sit down with my Bible, my journal, and my copy of The Valley of Vision. There I try to meet with God and see what He has for me for the day. Most days I have already done a Bible reading and had a time of prayer.

For me I need that. I understand why the psalmist writes – ‘My voice you will hear in the morning. I will direct my voice to You and I will look up to you.’

That seems to encapsulate what devotional time should be; lifting our voices to heaven and then looking to Him for an answer. For me the best time for that is in those quiet hours when no one else is stirring.

Now, there is no real right or wrong time for doing it, and while that is best for me I think the most important thing here is doing what the psalmist did. The key is the prayer and the looking for an answer.

We spend our days in all the work and tasks and busy-ness that make up our lives. So much of this is necessary and must be done. The problem is that during the other times we can be drawn by all kinds of entertainment and other trivial things. If we are not careful we end up spending the whole day without lifting our voices heavenward and looking there for answers to our prayers.

I have to spend that time first thing because otherwise I would get distracted and never get back to it. I appreciate those who have the discipline to do it later in the day or at night as way to wrap up the day.

The important thing is that we do it. Do we spend part of our day lifting our voices the God – then looking heavenward?