The world likes to creatively and continuously divide us into two kinds of people. Positive people and pessimists (though I prefer the term “realist”), Type A personalities and Type B, morning people and night owls. I was in college, voluntarily signing up for classes that began at 7:50am, when I realized that I was, in fact, a morning person. I love paralleling my routine with the sunrise. I revel at the thought that I’m one of the first awake, and in the quiet of the morning, I’m most confident in the nearness of Jesus. Because I’m still. And I can sense him in the stillness.

It was on that college campus in rural Indiana that I chose to read my Bible each day if I could. I’d come back from my first class of the day and read at my dorm room desk before it was time for the next lecture. I was inconsistent, but always better for it when I made the time.

Over the next several years, my consistency improved, and I got creative with how I got in the Word. Then motherhood happened and I learned what it was like to begin again. I listened to the Bible audibly over baby cries and when I was driving or folding laundry.

I’d feel guilty when I would try to recall what I just heard, because I couldn’t on most days, distracted by spit up or the next checklist to tackle. In those first years, I would only make it to May until my Bible reading plan was off track. And then the next year, I made it to July.

But I learned not to quit. Having the plan was important to hold me accountable, but even then, I knew the objective was to let God’s Word get through me more than measuring myself by how I made my way through it. It just took practice.

The church I grew up in always ended the last Sunday of the year with a vision message about being in the Word of God somehow, every day. Each pastor took turns giving this message, and I’ve never forgotten its importance. My grandparents modeled this; my parents practiced it. I can tell you exactly where I’d see my dad’s Bible as a kid, visible and lived in. My mom’s Bible would travel around the house with her, most often landing on the kitchen table or counter. Seeds of steadiness took root within me long before I took up the daily rhythm myself.

Many years of practice later, I eventually arrived at December 31st in my reading plan. A small decision made alone in a quiet dorm fourteen years ago formed a habit of being in my Bible every morning. Not without struggle or adaptation over the past decade, but with resolve. It started trying to wake up 15 minutes before I predicted my kids would wake up. With trial and error, I kept waking up and trying again. It’s since morphed into giving myself an hour to sit at the kitchen counter with my Bible, my journal, and the aroma of brewed coffee.

In previous years, I’ve gone through the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. One year, I read the four Gospels once a month. Just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John twelve times over. This year I’m going through the Bible in a Year again, the plan I started with when I was 18. Each day when I finish reading, I reflect on blank journal pages. Never with any lines. Just white space reserved for ideas and ink.

I’ve had a lot to reflect on this year. I miss my grandparents. I wonder if I bring them up too often to other people, if I’m supposed to be removed from the grief by now. The truth is, I’m surprised by how often I wake up each morning and sit at the countertop and think about their legacy. Of what I wish I could tell them. What I remember when I think about them. So I write it all down.

One of the conversations I had with my grandpa in the last year was about memorizing Scripture. He was passionate about making it a priority. He’d work at his desktop computer and email the grandchildren documents with Scripture, ready to print, cut out, and keep in front of us. I never printed it out. I never tried, not even for Grandpa. I thought it was a nice idea, but I stopped trying to memorize verses when I got to high school because I had tests to study for and the periodic table to learn.

My dad is built like my grandpa. As a kid, I’d roam the house, looking for my parents to predictably ask them for things. Sometimes I’d come across empty rooms and observe the surroundings before trying another. Dad had a tall honey oak dresser with the pulls built into the drawers. No hardware, just solid wood that had goldened with age and a doily covering the surface. I’d see his watch and his wallet and a small, sweaty stack of his business cards, curved from being held in the shape of his palm.

On the blank side of the cards was Scripture in his all-caps handwriting that he wrote out with his favorite Pilot pens. He would take these cards with him on his morning runs and return them to the dresser when he got back. Perspiration at times made the blue ink bleed as he’d fixate on what they meant and what they asked of him.

As January turned to February this year, I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s hospice bed while she slept and read the book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. I fought back tears as I read, in part because the words he wrote are powerful and have outlived their author, and also because I wanted to live out the title like my grandma had. Eyes always fixed on Jesus. An obedience to his Word formed through fortitude and faith.

I finished the book after Grandma made it to heaven, and throughout the text, Peterson persisted in encouraging the reader to memorize Colossians 3:1-17, all the way to the very end. I printed out the passage from Bible Gateway and taped it to my bathroom mirror. I’d read it over and over while I brushed my teeth. Eventually, I moved the paper from the front of my mirror to the backside of the medicine cabinet door in favor of something much shorter, James 4:10.

Not long after Grandpa went to be with Grandma, I was sitting at the kitchen counter during my morning time with Jesus, and Grandpa’s words came to mind again. I failed to honor his hope of hiding God’s Word in my heart when he was living, but just like the mornings are new again, so is my opportunity.

I grabbed a stack of index cards and a Pilot pen. I flipped to the blank side because that just seemed right, and began to write out Colossians 3:1-17. One verse for every card. The cards made their way to my car dashboard, sliding around the open console for months. Every now and then, I’d flip through them when I was waiting at a light or waiting for the school bus. A few weeks ago, I made a last-minute decision to take them with me into the gym. A learned behavior observed in childhood.

As I began to move and to sweat, I worked my way through the cards and through the verses. In an hour and to my shock, I had all seventeen memorized after months of putting it off. If anyone saw me on the Stairmaster that day, they likely thought I was whispering incantations above everyone’s heads and smiling about it. But what I felt was free.

The Word of God is inspiring. Knowing that and experiencing it are two different things. “Grandpa, thank you.” was all that came through my mind as I walked out to my car. Lighter. Equipped. This was different from all the summer camps I spent memorizing Scripture and earning prizes. The prize now was a clear mind, a growing sense of the Holy Spirit speaking through the Gospel, made portable.

I went back to the YMCA the next day, and the next, and worked on memorizing it again. Once I had the first seventeen verses down, I kept going all the way into Chapter 4 the following week. I wrote out what I memorized and recite it now at home. I smile when I see that sweat is starting to wear the edges of the paper.

“May the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” and “May the Word of Christ dwell in you richly” are slowly working their way into my self-talk. This is what Grandpa knew. This is the baton he handed to the generation after him. The Gospel changes everything. Seventeen index cards are infiltrating my entire thought process; their words are infusing themselves into my soul.

I still feel my imperfections, my impatience, and my shortcomings. I have an acute awareness that I’ve allowed my pride to hinder so many things, especially at home. And yet, I recall the beginning of Verse 1 and my eyes get set on a new path, a better way to live.

The last several years have been a process of renewing my mornings. Now, I’m reorienting my days by putting the Bible on wheels in my brain, so that when I get up from that kitchen counter, I am still being conformed to Christ. This morning, I was soaking in my last few minutes with the Lord, journaling final thoughts. My kids were arguing, followed by the bang of the piano keys, intentionally hammered on with an attitude intended to drown out the cries of the other brother, while a walkie-talkie was squelching between static, trying to reset itself to base.

Hurriedly, I went to my shelves to find a quote I had written out at the beginning of the new year in an old journal. As I sat back down, I overshot my search and landed on February 2nd, 2025 instead. My memory of those first few months of the year is hazy at best, eating meals out of my purse on the way to the hospital, leaving where I was on a whim to try to make it to see my grandparents in haste, never knowing if it would be the last time.

My breath caught in my chest when I read the notes I had taken that Sunday. Our church teaches the Bible expositorily, verse by verse. I flipped to my notes from the Sunday before and the Sunday after to make sure I was seeing correctly. We were finishing our study of 2 Kings before moving on to the book of Titus.

We weren’t studying Colossians at all. Except that Sunday. We studied Colossians 3:1-17. Four days before my Grandma passed away. The same day I began reading A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by her bedside.

On the last page of my notes, I wrote out the words Pastor Johnnie gave us that day:

• Change the way we think!
• 1 Peter 4 “because love covers a multitude of sin”
• Thankful people are changed people. They see and treat people differently.
• It’s really easy to complain; sometimes it’s hard to be grateful.
  • Abide in me & I in you.
  • You’ll know how to pray when you do.
  • John 15 & Ephesians 5
• Whatever you do, whatever you say, may it be consistent w/ Christ

Jesus knew. He knew what I needed. He began his pursuit of my heart and my mind through Colossians 3 nearly eight months ago. Each morning at the 5 o’clock hour, when I turned on the dim light above the kitchen sink, he was preparing me to receive his Word for the very moment he ordained. The impressions made on my heart, seeing my parents carve out quiet time, seeing sweat-stained business cards in an empty room, talking with Grandpa in his recliner about memorizing the Bible, are evidence of God speaking to me through every conscious thought and subconscious memory still today.

If there’s only one thing I’d change–of course, it’s that I didn’t start practicing all of this sooner. My self-talk over the years has gotten really destructive and unedifying, likely a story for another day. Which is another reason why I’m grateful for the mornings. I am so thankful they always come with an invitation to begin again. To start new. Jesus is always teaching me something, and he’s always showing me in ordinary moments that he is the better way.

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another,…” Colossians 3:12-13a

May the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, too, that you may experience the love of Christ firsthand, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Take care & take heart,