This could also be titled “Mornings! I Love Mornings!”
I used to like mornings more. When a person says he’s not a “morning person,” he might be throwing up a smokescreen for not having good sleep patterns. Maybe he’s lazy or unmotivated in general. I think I would fall into the “morning person” category, but not as much as I once did.
I don’t have much trouble getting started. But I don’t have any impressive morning habits, either. I’m a slouch, when it comes right down to it.
June and Ken Nicholson were lifelong friends of my parents. They were New Englanders, living all their adult lives in Vermont. They were both teachers—special education and science, respectively—and were well regarded both in the public schools and in their tiny church where Ken was a shepherd.
When Jedd was 3 or 4, the Nicholsons came to visit us in western New York. They spent a night or two and then continued their journey westward. As they walked out across our gravel driveway to leave, June was talking about prayer. She asked me if I prayed every morning. I gave some sort of namby-pamby answer like “not always” or “I try to sometimes,” and she immediately responded with a warmly confident exhortation, “Well, you should!” When we had visited in their home a year or so before that, we were talking about coffee, and I can still hear her voice saying that Ken “always has two cups.” Prayer and coffee were hallmarks of their mornings, and that combination is common, almost at the level of a Christian devotional meme.
My mom once said, “The best thing you can do for your body in the morning is drink water.” The body needs hydration, and it has spent a few hours without any new infusions of water. Drinking water in the morning makes so much sense to me. I do that almost every day, and I usually drink several glasses of water throughout the day, too.
When he was young, my dad took the words to a well-known poem and set them to a melody. My mom harmonized the tune 60 years later. Dad had apparently been inspired by the notion of praying and communing with God in the morning. The last line of the poem still gets me: “I must meet God in the morning if I want Him through the day.”
I typically have between two and four cups of coffee in the a.m., and I don’t think it matters whether, or how much, I drink.
I almost never consciously pray in the mornings now. I almost never feel that I “meet God in the morning,” and I do think that matters. I’m the worse because of a lack of regular and/or focused praying.
Mornings! I used to love mornings, but not as much now. There’s just not as much to get up for. June and Ken and Mom and Dad all had their good practices, and the suggestions, if not all the practices, have become pieces of my life. Hey, at least I do get up, and I almost always drink a glass of water before coffee or anything else. Just not living water. Or maybe I do drink from God and don’t even realize it. Is it possible that my subconscious or unconscious mind is communing with God, outside time? In fact, it is early morning right now, as I finalize this post. I think . . . I’m not sure, mind you, but I think . . . that I’m weakly “meeting God” right now.
This occasional series, Bits and pieces, is about people who cross our paths, touching us somehow. The first post includes the poem from which the idea and title are taken. I enjoy spotlighting just a few of the people who have influenced parts of me, hoping to spur thought, appreciation, contemplation, or something worthwhile in readers. A number of you have become bits and pieces of my life.
Earnestly Speaking 