Note:
It’s funny how everyone wants to claim our mornings. Studies now show that the “best” time for exercise is in the morning. Productivity mavens say that our most creative work hours are in the morning. Writing teachers (often) hold up examples of this or that famous writer who wrote prolifically by regularly taking advantage of the morning hours. And here Bonhoeffer (as well as elsewhere other writers on the spiritual life) writes about the benefit and even necessity of using the morning hours for prayer. So unless we decide that we will take a morning run in the spirit of continuous prayer while dictating our creative ideas for our novel’s next chapter into our cell phone, I guess we have to pick and choose. Or try to justify alternating a prayer morning with an exercise morning. Or find a way to stretch the morning. One can only get up so early before one is destroying one’s sleep; and one can only delay lunch for so long (especially if is actually also breakfast) before one is destroying one’s nutrition and metabolism cycles.

Quote:
“The prayer of the morning will determine the day. Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and our relations with other people very frequently have their cause in neglect of the morning prayer. The organization and distribution of our time will be better for having been rooted in prayer.”

Source: Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954, page 71. (original German pub in 1939)