P.O.W.E.R. Morning RoutinesSýnishorn

Reading & Writing: Orient Your Mind

After orienting your heart toward God with prayer and Bible reading, it’s now time to orient your mind. Mornings are wonderful for spiritual growth, but they also make a great time for intellectual and personal growth. Your productive morning routine, therefore, should also have a spot for journaling and reading.

Writing, like speaking, is the act of forming thoughts into communicable material—something suitable to be interpreted by another mind. That’s why journaling can seem strange to people who don’t do it. Journaling is like talking to yourself but even weirder. But even if you don’t intend for your journal to ever be read by another soul, the process of putting your thoughts into words on a page forces you to clarify your thinking. It’s like starting up a lawnmower that’s been sitting all winter—it might take a few pulls and it might not sound nice or smell very good, but once it finally gets started, you’re ready to work. There might be some fits and starts when you first put pen to paper, but think of morning journaling as just getting your brain started.

There are also numerous spiritual benefits to daily journaling. This is why I like to journal right after I’ve read the Word and prayed. Journaling creates a record of God’s providence in your life, something to look back on during dark days. Your journal also provides a place to record your insights from reading Scripture. In fact, one simple journaling practice I like is to choose a verse from your daily Bible reading, copy it to your journal, and write a few thoughts about it. I’ve found this to be a practical method for meditating on the Scriptures in a focused way.

But journaling is just one half of the “R” in a POWER morning. The other half is reading. I said earlier that successful people tend to have a morning routine, but there’s another characteristic they tend to share: successful people are readers.

We’ve been called to steward our very lives for God. And no matter if you’re a businessperson, homemaker, lineman, or line cook, you can always be honing your craft through disciplined reading.

Personally, I’ve found that with the busyness of life, mornings have become the best time for me to consistently get in a few pages of reading each day. You might be surprised by how much progress you can make in a year by simply reading a little bit every single day. Even if you read only three pages per day, that would add up to over 1,000 pages of reading each year. Or you could do a lot more each morning. The point isn’t the volume of reading, but the consistency. A little bit each day will go a long way.

If your morning routine time is on the shorter side, consider taking advantage of audiobooks or podcasts during your commute or while exercising. Even if journaling and reading aren’t your thing, you might find that other creative and mentally stimulating activities like playing music, drawing, or practicing a new skill are better for engaging your mind in the mornings. The main point of this part of the morning routine is to be setting aside a little time to train your brain to the glory of God.