Daily Manna · Day 134 · May 14
Morning Prayer
“My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.”
Many Christians have tried to keep a morning prayer time and then quietly let it go.
That struggle deserves to be described fairly, without shame. Some people are not morning people and never will be. Some are woken at five by a small child, and they are not going to arrange their thoughts before God with a toddler on one hip. Turning one line of a psalm into a rule for everybody can make a good verse into a heavy burden. Plenty of people have quietly dropped the habit because they could not keep a rule that God never actually made.
So look carefully at what the verse does say: "in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up." The word direct is a special one in Hebrew. It is used for laying wood in order on an altar, and for setting out a case in court. It means ordered and aimed. Then comes a second verb, and it is stronger than most English makes it feel. Look up is the word for a watchman on the city wall, scanning the road for a runner with news. So the psalm is not describing an early alarm clock. It describes an order of things, and it expects an answer. David's voice goes up to God before anything else comes in, and then he waits like a man who believes an answer is on its way.
That leaves you with a question, and it is worth sitting with before you answer. What gets your first words of the day? This is about your first hour, not your best one. And the last time you prayed, did any part of you stay up on the wall afterward, watching the road for God's answer? David was sure of one thing: "My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD." You can be just as sure that God hears you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 134 is Sit Still (Ruth 3:18).