This year I’ve been experimenting with the order of things. First it was in the physical realm. Despite no change in the way I ate or exercised, my blood sugar had been creeping up. I wanted to see if I could change it without drugs or supplements, simply by moving more after meals. Except I didn’t actually start moving more; I merely moved the timing of my movement to directly after meals.

I had no idea if it would be sufficient, but my most recent bloodwork showed it was working, and even better than I had anticipated. Apparently timing matters.

Now here comes the embarrassing part, the part I wish I didn’t have to say out loud but know I need to: In the morning I used to check email first thing, and I frequently read the news first thing. This was a habit that developed during the early days of the pandemic when I was watching COVID numbers across the world and trying to determine which day we should evacuate Cambodia. I continued checking the news for epidemiological insight into whether to wear a mask, when and how to social distance, what to do when a vaccine or new variant would arise, etc.

But the habit didn’t disappear when the threat of acute COVID disappeared. I kept up with my morning email and news check. This was not something that had intruded into my morning quiet times in Cambodia, and I knew this routine was harming my spiritual life, but I felt powerless to overcome it. Our habits can just be so sticky.

I still had a morning time. It’s just that it came after a rush of stress hormones of all types and sizes. About a year ago I took email and Messenger off my phone (did you know it has a back door to Facebook?!). This helped a lot both in the mornings and managing my stress when I was out of the house, but I still played word games in the morning before my quiet time. I felt so jet lagged in the mornings. I told myself that the word games — plus that extra cup of coffee — were helping me wake up.

And maybe they did, in a way, but they didn’t always leave enough time to have a thoroughly satisfactory quiet time.

Then in a Bible class we were given the homework of developing a prayer practice first thing in the morning, before anything else. I already had a morning practice, but it didn’t happen first thing. And since after all these years I am still such a rule follower, I wanted to make sure I did the homework “correctly.” So I switched the order of things and found, not to my surprise, that my morning time was much richer and fuller.

I also discovered that I don’t actually need Wordle to wake my brain up. It’ll wake up on its own, eventually, hands cupped around my coffee. As it turns out, I don’t even need word games in my life at all. At first I just played those games later in the day, but after a week or so I realized I wasn’t even doing that anymore. It’s crazy to think that I don’t even miss them now.

My morning times are longer these days. There’s more time for processing, for praying, for hearing from God, and even for inspiration for my writing life. I’m happier throughout the day, and I have more to give to the people who matter to me. Because timing matters. Order matters. And when we order our lives around eternal things, somehow the temporal things in our lives re-order themselves as well.

My habits may be better now, but every morning I still have a choice. I know what is good for me and what feels good long term, but I still have a split second each morning in which I must choose between the infilling of the Holy Spirit and the inflow of the world’s priorities. Between the prayer closet and Pandora’s box. Between acquiescing to technology and searching for buried treasure. Each and every morning, I must still choose life.

For more of my reflections on the life of faith,
read my book, The Hats We Wear.