Growing up I was told that thirty minutes (minimum!) with God in the morning was essential. 

“If I don’t spend time with God in the morning, my whole day feels wrong”. An oft-spoken, well-meant slice of anecdotal evidence regarding the importance of time with God, but misleading in its lack of context.

Since being aware of this concept I’ve had many, many days feel wrong and go wrong. Many of them indeed started without intentional time with God.

And this is what I came to conclude:

If I forget God in the morning, then He doesn’t accompany me throughout the day, thus things go wrong. In essence: If I forget God, he forgets me. 

When I look upon that once believed idea I feel ill. I see it for what it is. A gross misrepresentation of the character of God. A bare-faced lie. A lie I want to correct, because I’ve learned something since, and I learned it in a season of many days that felt wrong.

In those days that felt wrong, I turned to God. 

I turned to God because alongside the lies I believed, I also believed some truth. 

I believed that He was the last One standing when everyone and everything else crumbled away from me. I believed that He said He loved me. So I ran towards Him.

I cuddled in close with His character, and in that embrace I found something magnificent about my identity.

I found that God called me worthy of His love and that love was more than I could have imagined. I found that He wanted to pour His goodness all over me. I found that my flaws, my sin, were no barrier to His love or His desire to be close to me. I found that He was and is doing everything in His power to bring me into everlasting life, where the certainty of my identity in Him will bring me peace forever.

And friends, that knowledge made the wrong days feel better. That knowledge helped the wrong days go right. If I forget that knowledge the wrong days feel worse. If I forget that knowledge the right days go wrong. 

Spending time with God is not like a contract I must sign in order to have Him accompany me on my day so He can sweep the bad feelings away and use His great power to chop obstacles out of my path.

No. Spending time with God is much more like getting a hug or an affirming word from someone I love before I head out the door in the morning. It is a warm reminder of my value and potential. It is a reminder of how very loved I am and how very loved the people I encounter throughout my day are.

And that reminder is waiting at any time of the day.