By Tessa Kirby 
It was 6 o’clock in the morning when I snuck out of bed, tip-toeing down the hall, careful not to wake the sleeping tiny humans from their deep slumber. I tried my hardest to wipe the sleep from my eyes as I fumbled through my kitchen cabinets trying to find my favorite coffee mug in the dark. As I brewed my favorite cup of coffee, I watched as the sun poured into my living room, silently touching my favorite spot in the room. Walking sheepishly over to grab my bible, I sank slowly into the comfort of my vintage sofa, allowing the rays from the winter sun to wrap me up in it’s warmth. I opened up the soft, weathered pages of my bible and picked up where I had left off in John.
As I soaked up the beauty of the moment, my thoughts abruptly turned to discontentment…
Why am I even reading this? I know I’m not going to get anything out of this short chapter…there’s bound to be a child about to wake up and I’m going to have to lay aside my time once again.
I could feel a sense of bitterness beginning to well up inside of me.
Why must I work so hard in a relationship that often feels so one-sided? Why do I have to read scripture and listen to sermons that I can’t even comprehend?
I could feel a shift in my spirit as my thoughts became less and less my own. I could feel my heart grow weary and burdened. But then I heard it. The soft voice that so often gets mistaken as a whisper or our own misunderstood conscience. It was there in the soft light of the early morning sun that He spoke to me. It’s not often that I hear His voice so profoundly but when I do, it seems to shake me to the very core because it is unlike anything that I would ever expect the King of Kings to say to ME.
Softly, gently, He proclaims:
My daughter, thank you. I know the sacrifice is not easy and your rest is fleeting but the joy I feel when you spend just one minute with me is irreplaceable. Come to me in the morning and I will give you rest, I will fill your days with supernatural energy and never-ending joy. For it’s in the moments that you come to me that I see your heart and I see your dreams more clearly. Press in and I will continue to take you places you never thought you could go.
As I listened to His voice surround me, I barely noticed my three year old daughter snuggling up beside me. I pushed the hair out of her eyes and watched as she starred whimsically out the window to the painted sky. “Mom, I wish we could play on those clouds. Then we could go see Jesus, right mom?” Long pause. “Except…we don’t have a ladder mom, so we can’t go up there.”
It was then that it hit me – our time with Jesus is never going to look like how we imagined it would. But the beauty of that is this. He never expects it to look that way either! No amount of time – long or short – is going to define our status as believers. God wants us JUST the way we are; tired, raw, bitter, worn out, angry. He loves us through it all and when we come before Him with boldness and sincerity, He will honor us. That’s the kind of King He is, and that’s the kind of God we serve.
by Brittany Moore 
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