Every morning when I wake up, I reach for my cell phone.  I look for text messages first to see if my grown children (whose lives continue far later into the night than mine) had anything to share.  Then I check my email in case any of my students in different time zones had questions about their work.  I scroll through Instagram for no reason whatsoever and land on the weather so I know what to wear that day.  This ritual happens daily regardless of early-rising children or other unexpected interruptions.

Four years ago, I kept an Advent Journal in an attempt to discipline myself to focus on the season daily instead of scrambling to do the “work” of Christmas and then breathlessly stopping on Christmas Eve to think about the meaning—too little, too late.  That Advent season was by far the best of my life, and I have been wanting to do it again.  So this year, instead of reaching for my cell phone habitually each morning, I am committing to reach for Him.

My class is reading a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  It argues that to change an old habit into a new habit, the cue and reward that precede and follow the habit need to remain, but the routine or action of the habit needs to change.  So for Advent, I am literally placing a small devotional on top of my cell phone each night.  When I wake in the morning and instinctively reach for my phone, my hand will find the devotional instead, and I will commit to reading it before reading anything on my phone.  A small gesture, yes.  But I know what God does with small things—like mustard seeds and coins and fish and nails and babies in mangers.  And I’m pretty sure whatever He does with the gesture will be of far more value than anything my iPhone has to offer.

At some point in the day—and it may very well be near midnight—I am going to write in this journal, partially for the accountability, but mostly because I love to write, and I know God is calling me to write again.  A lot has changed in my life since that Advent four years ago, and it is tempting to think that I can no longer do something like this.  But God is all about stretching us, and I am pretty confident that if I do the reaching, He will do the rest.

“Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.” (Jeremiah 33:3)