I am a morning person.

That term is often used to describe someone who can wake up at some ungodly hour as alert as a fighter pilot passing through enemy airspace. Someone who doesn’t need even a hint of daylight to begin his or her day. This is not what I mean when I say that I am a morning person. Pulling away from the embrace of sleep and actually putting feet to cold floor does not fill me with positivity. The cold water I splash on my face in the bathroom is not the symbolic christening of a new day, but a necessary dousing for my senses to reactivate, like smelling salts under a boxer’s broken nose. I brew my first cup of coffee with a kind of desperation – the Keurig is never slower than at 6 AM.

No, I am not a morning person because I have no problem waking up early. I am a morning person because I recognize the value of the early morning hours. As a father of pre-schoolers, there are precious few stretches of silence in my house, and the ones that come after evening bedtimes find mine and my wife’s collective strength sapped. I have hardly enough energy to watch an entire Dateline episode or read more than a single chapter of a novel.

Shows like this are more compelling when your brain is already half asleep.

So, despite the difficulty, every weekday I rise earlier than the rest of my family. I stagger down the hall to the kitchen, clumsily trying to avoid the creakiest of the floorboards, and hold a yawn so pronounced that most of my coffee brews before it dies away. Then I pick up my coffee, my laptop, my Bible, and whatever book on theology I’m currently working my way through, and I tip-toe to the living room. There, on the sofa under the lamp, I have my “quiet time.”

Growing up in an evangelical church, I heard that term a lot – quiet time. While there is no specific mention of the concept in Scripture, I was taught that, above all things, the obedient Christian is one who keeps a daily quiet time.

And the über-spiritual take it to the next level.

If you grew up in the Church, too, chances are you’ve heard the importance of something like this expressed. Most of the teachers I had in my youth not only encouraged the keeping of a quiet time, but they usually offered a formula for what one looked like. A quiet time, they said, consisted of the following:

1. prayer, not only for myself but also for a list of other people (and a good Christian always kept a list)
2. reading the Bible – either a Psalm or a Gospel story or a portion of a letter – with or without the aid of a devotional book (until you graduated to concordances and commentaries and thus added the spiritual discipline of cross-referencing into your quiet times)
3. journaling, in which you muse on the intersections of life and Scripture, or perhaps write out your prayers (before Facebook and Tumblr suggested we share those thoughts and prayers with everyone everyday).

I spent years trying to make this formula work for me. I was white-knuckling it, trying to force an enlightenment that I was told was the natural product of keeping this practice faithfully.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that, just like the Sabbath, a quiet time was made for the person, not a person for the quiet time.

That awkward moment when you’re unsure whether or not you just read something heretical.

It took years of student ministry for me to realize this, but after dozens of conversations with frustrated young people, I finally wised up. My heart went out to them, because they were struggling with the same deep sense of guilt that I struggled with, all because they had missed a day here and a week there, or because after months of forcing the formula, they felt very little difference in their spirits. Not only were they result-biased, but the drudgery of keeping the formula had cultivated an aversion to both prayer and Bible study within them. They were sick of it, but stopping meant conceding it was all for nothing.

“I bought my journals in bulk. I can’t just stop!”

Next week, I will explore some of the reasons why people fail at the traditional quiet time formula as often as others succeed. In the meantime, however, let it be known that I have no “better way” to offer in its place.

What I have is what is unique to my own experience, but I think that is part of the truth about “quiet times.” What I have is a steaming cup of coffee, a laptop, a Bible, and a whatever book on theology I’m currently reading. What I have is a silent house and a sofa and a lamp. What I have is a physical body that is not ready to wake up, but a spirit that is eager to be awakened. So I do what I can for it – I read a short passage of Scripture, and part of a chapter on theology, and then I turn on my laptop. I work on the same old novel, or on a short story, because telling those stories engages my spirit more than any journal entry ever did. And after showering and dressing, packing my bag and heading off to work, I realize that I am happy, that God wants me to be happy, and that he has made me a certain way, with particular interests and energies, none of which should ever be formulated or templated for anyone else.

In the car, I breathe out prayers of thankfulness. I thank God that his mercies are not carrot-and-stick. I thank him that I have been remade – a new creation he sees and declares to be good. I thank him that there is no such thing as an ungodly hour.