Waking

My eyes snap open as I hear the scream in the middle of the night. I am halfway to the bedroom door by the time my brain begins putting things together. It’s coming from the boys’ room. Probably Coulter. It’s amazing what the mind can do before you know the mind is doing anything. I am halfway down the hallway before he even takes a breath to start his second scream, and I open the door just in time to watch him let it rip. He is sitting up in his little bed, looking every bit the tiny human that he is. His “big boy” bed is barely bigger than a park bench, and he is clutching his blankies. His hair is rumpled. The pacifier clipped onto the collar of his Spider-Man pj’s dangles down his chest. I gather him up into my arms. Like all kids in crisis, he must feel love before he can talk about it. In a moment the screaming stops. As he quiets, I say, “Coulter, what’s wrong, buddy?” He looks at me, for a moment calm, and then bursts back into tears. “A monster!” He wails. “Getting me!” The next couple of minutes are exactly what you expect: I sit with him, as his sniffles die down. I tell him there is no monster, and that it was only a dream, but such things are only so effective. Why? Because whether we’re big or little, we humans struggle to connect this gap between our heads and our hearts. Shaking in his bed at three years old, Coulter is a picture of the human condition. Rationality, by itself, has never calmed a single fear in children or in parents. It is entirely possible to know that one thing is true but feel completely the opposite. He “knows” there are no monsters in the closet, but he shakes in his bed nonetheless. We “know” that God loves us and is working everything out for good, yet we shake in our anxieties nonetheless. For all of us, fully coming to terms with reality is a process that must involve feeling as much as knowing.

This is what stories are for—moving reality from the head to the heart. We must tell and retell the stories of reality to ourselves and our children, lest we continue to live in our bad dreams. So I tell him a story. “Coulter, if a monster tried to come get you, you know what I would do?” “What?” he says, half nervous and half curious. “I would grab him by his monster tail and spin him around the room like this.” I whirl my hand over my head. “Then, when he was so dizzy, I would let him go and toss him out the window like this!” I throw the invisible monster at the window. Coulter suppresses a giggle at the thought of it. Then I ask him, “Will I always be here to protect you?” This is a question we have rehearsed, and he knows his line: “Yeah,” he says. I hold him for another moment. As a truer version of reality begins to settle in, he finally lies back down. Soon we are both back in bed. Before I fall asleep, the thought briefly crosses my mind: “I am much more like Coulter than I’d like to admit.” It’s true, for all of us, really. Before we are parents of our kids, we are children. Most important, children of a heavenly father. Understanding how we are parented by that heavenly father changes everything about the way we parent our children. Coulter had woken up to an alternate version of reality. It was not real, but it caused real fear. He needed a parent to hold him, calm him, and speak the true story of reality over him. Most days, we need the same thing. Most days, we wake up to our own monsters, desperately in need of a heavenly parent to remind us the truth about reality—that we are loved by a good God, and because of him, everything is going to be okay.

Waking up to Reality

As parents, we must begin an examination of the habits of our household by looking at our own habits because, after all, we become our habits and our kids become us. And this examination begins with the habits of waking.

While waking may be a given, waking to reality is not. Alot depends on the stories we tell ourselves when we awake.

When the first thing I do in the morning is roll over, grab my phone, and begin scanning work emails, I wake to the monsters of performance. The story of reality is about what I can get accomplished today and whether I can justify my existence. When I begin the morning in social media, I wake to the monsters of comparison and envy. The story of reality is about the pictures of other people’s lives and whether I can measure up. When I begin the morning in the news headlines, the monsters of fear and anger nearly jump through the screen. The story of reality is about how the world is falling apart and how mad I should be at the others who just don’t get it. Or when I lie in bed recounting the day’s to-do list (or when I jump up and immediately start the rush to get everyone out the door on time), I wake to the monster of busyness. The story of reality is how there is always too much to do and never enough time to do it. All of these lies are like the monsters in Coulter’s closet. Intellectually, I know that they aren’t the real stories of the world. But practically, it sure seems like they are because I rehearse feeling them every morning.

The thing about habits is they are so small they often go under the radar. Yet they are the building blocks of our life. Thats why the stakes of our habits are so high. The Bible tells us that a little leaven leaveneth the whole loaf, and the small foxes are the ones that destroy the vine. When I let these little monsters into my life, they start to suffocate the truth that I know is right.

We have to start waking up, to HOW we wake up. That is a much more spiritual matter than when we wake up. We must see that the first role of a parent is not to get everyone up on time but to root our household habits of waking in the truth of the gospel. For in the story of God, our call is not simply to wake up our bodies each day but to awaken our hearts to God’s love.

Ephesians 5:13–14 “But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

Christ gives us light or illumination. He shows us what is really in front of us. Light opens our understanding. It puts into perspective all the monsters we’ve created. When we focus on Christ, the monsters of performance, comparison, envy, fear, anger, and busyness all seem to fade away and they lose their importance on my life.

Morning Habits

Think of these next three habits as ways to let the light in. We might already be doing these habits. We all have routines that to us, are habits. I encourage us look at these habits and see if we can slightly alter something in our routine to better let the light in.

Again, these habits are all suggestions. They aren’t Scripture. They are Biblically-principled in nature, but variable in practice. You don’t have to do these exact practices to be a Biblical Christian.

Habit 1- A Simple Prayer upon Waking

I usually wake to a head full of thoughts and questions. “Why is that kid up so early?” “What am I going to say at that meeting?” Or, “Why am I always so tired?” As we all do, I have an option each morning: Do I indulge this distorted reality, or do I bend the knee to God’s reality?

The habit of kneeling by our bed to pray immediately upon waking helps us displace all these other possible thoughts and spend the first moment of morning looking for the light. Though I am tired, the act of kneeling takes hold of the mind by taking hold of the body. Though I am full of anxious thoughts about the day, saying a short prayer gently introduces a different reality: the backdrop of God’s love and care for me despite what I need to do.

Though many of my questions about the day are probably valid (our monsters always wear a mask of truth), framing them in a short prayer sets them in the context of God’s concern for my concerns. It reminds me that my troubles do exist, though they might not mean what I think they mean. My concerns are not to be ignored but rather examined in the light of the reality of God’s love.

Psalm 55:17 “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: And he shall hear my voice.”

Try to put the first thoughts of the day into a form of prayer. If I wake up to exhaustion, I might put it into a request: “Lord, don’t let me snap at the kids just because I chose to go to bed late.” If my work concerns clutter my mind, they will probably find their way into a petition: “God, may I reflect your image in my work today and not worry about my own image.” If I’m struggling with my annoyances with my kids (which always threatens to reduce them to problems to be managed instead of image-bearers to be loved), I will try to put that into a prayer where they become human again: “Lord, may I love and serve my children this morning as you loved and served me.”

Usually this short habit is carried out alone and right beside the bed, immediately after shutting off the alarm. Sometimes it happens with Lauren and it gets drawn out a bit because it’s Saturday. Once in a while it happens with a kid at my side because they have woken me early. If so, I will invite them into the ritual by putting an arm around their shoulder and asking them to kneel with me. Sometimes they want to pray too; usually they just want to hear me do it.

But no matter how it unfolds, this moment is always as short as it is significant. Small things in the right place have enormous consequences. So it is with prayer. The power of prayer is not proportionate to its length, for prayer works outside the physics of our intentions. And that is a good thing. No matter how short, prayer is the lever that can lift the heaviest of hearts.

Remember, it didn’t help Coulter when I just told him the monsters weren’t real. What helped is when I sat with him and held him. God offers this to us, morning after morning. He is the one sitting at our bedside, putting an arm around our tired body, inviting us to join him in prayer.

Habit 2 - Look to the Word before looking to my phone

Psalm 1:1–2 “Blessed is the man That walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor standeth in the way of sinners, Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; And in his law doth he meditate day and night.”

Story of Haven’s birth, cry during the c cection. Malerie not being able to see the baby at first. Haven listening for my voice and once finding it, locking onto it. not wanting to look away.

Neurologists say that we are all born looking for someone who is looking for us.7 It’s a beautiful way of describing what happens when the gaze of a newborn meets the gaze of a mother. Interpersonal neurobiology suggests that this moment is indeed as staggering as we feel it is. In this moment, two brains are changing each other. No matter the trauma of birth, in this first look, both of them feel the same: here is the one I’ve been looking for. In their gaze the world will be okay. It is an awe-inspiring moment that we never really get over.

Each morning we wake up looking for someone who is looking for us. We are hungry for the gaze of someone who loves us. We will look for it everywhere and anywhere, trying to find something to fill that God-shaped (and God-sized) hole our hearts.

This is what we are doing when we turn our gaze to the screen first thing in the morning. The human condition is to be uncertain about our identity. And because we are not sure who we are, when we look at emails or social media, our tired hearts cannot help but look to see if there is something there to fill that void.

When we look to our phone, we see the strange half-reflections of our own fears in the morning news. We see the hazy visions of who we wish we were as we scroll social media. We see refractions of our ambitions and worries in work emails and task lists. The tragedy, of course, is that we are looking for someone to look back at us, and no one is there.

Going to Scripture before we go to our smartphones is another small way to pattern the morning in the reality of God’s love. In a house full of children, this will look as messy as everything else does. Ideally, the pattern of Scripture before smartphone means I’m up before them, having a few minutes to read and reflect before they wake. But of course that is not always the reality, and it is important to know that that is fine. Sometimes, that is even better, because one of the ways we teach the habits of the household is by letting children observe our habits and inviting them into them. Some mornings this looks like listening to a psalm while holding a kid who is holding a sippy cup of milk on my lap.8 He is invited into the routine. Occasionally it means reading a Bible story out loud to one of them. Many, many mornings it means they also get a book, or a coloring page, and we have some minutes of quiet before we start breakfast.

Sometimes we are tempted to think, “Does this really matter?” While it is totally understandable to wonder this, it is even more important to note that this seed of doubt—if given into—can become the crack in the foundation of the strongest routines. So in theory, I wonder over this, but in practice, I know the answer: “Yes. It is always the smallest routines that build the strongest foundations.”The Word of God is actually true and God’s promises about it are actually real. It does not come back void. It pierces the heart. It reveals. Reading the Scriptures is a command and an invitation for a reason—it changes us.

Further, as it turns out, habits are formative. Making a ritual out of giving your attention to Scripture in the morning means a thousand other things you did not think about or intend: It means that your smartphone is not there distracting your brain with dopamine rushes. It means that taking a moment of pause is normal for your pace of life. It means you are slowly going through the Scriptures and starting to learn them. It means you are aggregating mornings where you do what you said you were going to do, honoring your conscience and casting a small vote of habit in favor of becoming the kind of person you are called to become.

So it is that the small things are the big things, and the tiny routines run the deepest. But above all of that, we are unlocking something else with our gaze. By turning our face to the Scriptures, we look and find a God who is looking back. We find the parent we want to imitate. Above all, we go to Scripture because we want to become more like him, and in turn, our children, who are by default becoming more like us, become more like him too.

Habit 3 - Practice a moment of gathering and sending

Growing up in a family of 4 kids and two parents who had full time jobs, you can imagine how our mornings were. Chaos. My dad didn’t usually help us get ready for school because he was out the door before we were really starting to get up. So it was left to my mom, all by herself, to get my older sister, myself, and two younger brothers out of bed, fed, and ready for school all before 7:45. I didn’t realize how chaotic the mornings were for my mom, until that one fateful morning. I remember I was by the door, my mom was yelling at something, and I remember looking up and seeing a shoe come flying toward me. My mom was upset that nobody was heading to the car and so she grabbed a shoe and hurled it toward me so I would get moving a bit quicker. I look back on that moment with a bit humor, because if you knew my mom, that story is so uncharacteristic of her. She serves others at great sacrificial cost to her self. But without purposefully routines, we succumb to the moment.

How would our story had been different if each morning instead of trying to get out the door, we focused on spending a quick moment in prayer and asking God to guide us through the day. What if that had been my story. How much different would my life be?

When we stop to have a word of prayer and ask for God’s guidance, we are reminded that we have purpose for that day. God didn’t create us to wander, he created us with purpose.

It could be a family breakfast and devotions. It could be a prayer you say during the car ride each morning. While it could be many things, I believe it is important to pay attention to this movement of gathering and sending, because without it, we usually default to being frayed and scattered by rush, rather than gathered and sent in love.

Habits as Grooves of Grace

Parenting makes it hard to see the world for what it is. There is no tiredness like the tiredness of a parent. And that is not just a physical reality, it is a spiritual one, which is why parents desperately need habits that help pull the curtains back and wake our sleepy hearts to the light of Jesus. Parenting cries out for a way to see. A way to see the significance of the moments that are passing before us, and a way to steward our families by stewarding those moments. This is why we need these habits. We don’t cling to habits to show how good we are at this thing called parenting, we cling to habits because we know we are otherwise so bad at it. Spiritual habits take moments where we would otherwise be tired failures and guide us toward God’s strength and love.

APPLICATION

So here is what I would ask you to do this week. Choose one or two of these habits and try to do them each day this week. Next week, would you share something you noticed in your life, or the life of your children as a result of implementing these habits.