Waking up at Ungodly O'clock

My college roommate will remember vividly what I put her through in college!  I have been an aspiring morning person since the beginning of time.  I feel like I specialize in the art of sleep.  My best friend is my pillow.  The feeling I want replicated over and over in my life is that of slowly sinking my head in my precious pillow and knowing that I am about to fall asleep.  Some of you want Heaven to have chicken enchiladas, or miniature red pandas, but I want Heaven to be that feeling playing on loop for eternity!  This being said, rewind to my first night in my dorm room with my super unfamiliar roommate, Kim, from Ohio.  I had this brilliant idea to wake up early my first morning in the dorm to spend some quality time with Jesus.  Because I don’t wake up easily, (note the enormous understatement) I had a very loud alarm clock sitting on the floor between our beds.  I’m not sure what time it was set for, but let’s just say the time was more than unrealistic - maybe verging on ludicrous.  Interestingly enough, my alarm clock didn’t wake me up that morning, my super patient roommate woke me up yelling “Holy Toledo!” and sitting bolt upright in her bed.  This is the first time I had ever heard someone use that exclamation in real life, and the first time I realized that my roommate was an excellent alarm clock.  I also had a realization that I was at Bible College because something else would have followed “Holy” if I had gone to a different school.  I must let you know also that after fumbling for the alarm clock and turning it off, I went back to sleep.  I’m not sure what time I actually woke up that morning.  

So much of my life has been spent forcing myself to be a morning person and then falling off the wagon.  One particular episode happened with Kim our second year of college.  We had wisely moved our beds further apart and she was now on the opposite side of the room.  She also had a sound machine placed right by her head to drown out my morning shenanigans.  I had this brilliant idea to force morning alertness.  I carefully placed my alarm clock in my underwear drawer in my dresser.  This served two purposes.  First, it muffled the sound of the alarm clock for my sweet roommate. Second, because we had really old dressers that were very hard to open, it created a challenge for me to conquer so that I would be fully alert by the time my alarm clock was shut off.  I fell asleep peacefully that night thinking that I would now achieve something remarkable.   In the morning, I woke up to the muffled sound of my alarm clock.  I groggily got up and proceeded to wrestle my drawer open.  I dug through the underwear, turned off my alarm clock, wrestled the drawer shut, and went back to bed, sunk my head in my pillow and had the above mentioned heavenly feeling.  Defeated again!  

But don’t think that I gave up hope!  I made another plan for the next morning.  I would make the process of turning off my alarm clock way more difficult.  But how? We had these desks that had a shelf above them.          On top of the shelf, I had precariously positioned my tall bookcase that reached to our very high ceilings.  (This created more floor space for us, and probably more danger too, but, hey, we were college students.)  The night before my second experiment, I grabbed my alarm clock, climbed on my chair, climbed on my desk, reached up on my tippy toes, held the wobbly bookcase with my left hand and gingerly place my plugged in alarm clock on the top shelf with my right hand.  I did already set it for ungodly o’clock before I put it up there in case you were wondering.  The next morning, I awakened to a loud alarm clock.  I quickly realized that it was day two of my experimenting and my clock was not in it’s normal location, so I slowly got out of bed, climbed on my chair, climbed on my desk, reached up on my tippy toes, held the wobbly bookcase with my left hand and gingerly turned off my alarm clock on the top shelf with my right hand.  I than climbed off my desk, climbed off my chair, got back into bed and had the above mentioned heavenly feeling. Defeated again!

Hmmm….so what is the purpose of this story.  Right now it is 7:51AM.  I did my devotions at 6:45AM.  How in the world, do you ask?  Well for the past two years, the Lord has blessed me with a job that starts at ungodly 4 o’clock in the morning.  After my job, I pray, memorize scripture, read my Bible, and write.  I realized that the best thing for me is to have an external motivation to be up, because my weakness is that I won’t do it without external motivation.  I am thrilled that I spend my quiet time with Jesus when it is quiet.  I am also aware that I had to help my weakness in some way.  There are things in your life that matter to you a ton.  Some of you are so disciplined that you simply get them done.  There are also a few of you like me, who need the Lord to give you a creative solution for your weakness.  So stop feeling bad about yourself and throwing in the towel and the alarm clock.  Start praying for creative solutions.  We have a creative God, who knows the exact prescription for our weakness.