As I rise and embrace the gift of this new day The way you greet the day matters. Your first lucid moments set the course for what follows. Set that course with intention, through a simple prayer, and you’ll be okay. The prayer needn’t be long, but it ought to be clear. In fact, the simpler, briefer, and more focused it is, the better.

For much of your life you’ve let the day start you. Your alarm wakens you, and you stumble out of bed. You start the coffee or a shower. A steady stream of thoughts flows through your head. You fetch the newspaper, turn on music or the TV. Maybe you check your email or head off to the gym. The mental stream swells, and as it does, your body and spirit are pulled along with it. Tension and stress tug at your neck and shoulders, the thought-stream nags at you, demanding more from your body than your body wants to give. So you pump a little more caffeine into your veins or jot another note on your to-do list. These thoughts—largely unexamined—have yanked you into a river whose direction you control far less than you realize.

But if you rise and announce your intention to greet with gladness the day God’s given you—if you breathe from the deep center within you where Christ dwells, if you feel the firmness of the earth beneath you, if you open your arms in a gesture of welcome and arrest those thoughts for just a moment, if you say with purpose, “I rise and embrace the gift of this new day,” then you’ll have altered the course of your personal history, you’ll have announced your intention to go against the stream—or at least no longer to follow blindly when you choose for a time to follow where it leads.

So, rise and embrace the gift of this new day. Arouse your spirit. Embrace the day, and join up with God. The moment of your rising and what you do with it has the power to change everything.

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