Mornings With God: Finding Grace and Growth

Ellen:
[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. This is Ellen, your host, and I’m so glad that you have joined us today. Have you ever noticed that the way you start your morning shapes your entire day? A good morning will help you enter your day purposefully, but too often our mornings are filled with chaos, frustration, and anxiety. But what if the first moments of your day didn’t feel reactive?

Ellen:
[00:00:20] What if they were instead rooted in the goodness of God? Well, our guest today has had her life changed by this very thing. Tara Beth Leach is a respected pastor, communicator, and leader who, in one of the hardest seasons of her life, made a counterintuitive decision to meet God every day in the dark hours before dawn.

Ellen:
[00:00:40] Today we’re going to hear Tara’s story of how these morning meetings transformed her spiritual walk. You will see that dawn is not merely a transition from night to day. In fact, consider this: it is an invitation to commune with a God who is waiting for you to awaken. Tara, welcome to the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. I’m so glad you’re here.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:01:00] Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Eellen:
[00:01:05] Absolutely. Well, you’ve shared that your practice of rising early—really early, like 4:30 in the morning—was born from a difficult season that had a lot of grief and change. What made you decide to turn to early morning devotions as a means for that relief?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:01:25] It was…

[00:01:30] Yeah, so my wilderness journey began in 2020, shortly after my dad was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer and was given four months to live. My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and then they lost their family home—our family home. At the time, my husband and I and our children were living in beautiful, sunny California. My parents were in Chicagoland and…

[00:01:55] My parents were in dire straits at the time, and so we felt called to move back to Chicagoland to honor my mother and father and to care for them. And we did exactly that right in the middle of a pandemic. We packed up everything and moved back to care for them. After 10 months of being able to be with my dad, being his caretaker, he passed. And then we were caretakers for my mother. In the…

[00:02:20] middle of a January polar vortex—freezing cold—I was just realizing that I had been waking up most mornings feeling completely despondent. I was waking up feeling purposeless. I was dragging myself out of bed. I was in a liminal space. Outside was a polar vortex, and I felt like I was even experiencing my own personal winter of the soul.

[00:02:45] And in the middle of that darkness, that dark season, that spiritual wilderness I was in, I heard the Lord distinctly speak to me: “Tara Beth, it’s time to take off those grave clothes. It’s time to wake up. It is time to rise with me.” And I knew that God was calling me to a spiritual awakening—to wake up from my slumber—but I also took it literally. And so I set the alarm the next morning for 4:30 a.m., and I woke up.

[00:03:10] I rolled out of bed, I rushed downstairs, I opened up my Bible, and I said, “Okay, God, here am I. Here am I—now what?” And I wasn’t sure what the mornings were supposed to look like. And so for six months, it really started to take shape. I would read the Bible, I would go to the gym, I would go for a walk and pray, I would listen to worship music. I started to do something called the Prayer of Examen. I also started to do Lectio Divina.

[00:03:35] I was craving… morning time was starting to be something I was really looking forward to. I could not wait for that morning hour. And I started even craving a sense of routine in the morning. And so I would find different rhythms that would work. And one morning, the Spirit just dropped in my soul this idea to frame it around “great,” because I had been saying that…

[00:04:00] my mornings were great. It was a great morning—not because of what happened that day, not because of what didn’t happen that day. Saying it was a great morning and a great day didn’t mean that it was going to be a perfect day, circumstantially. It might still very well have been a difficult day, but it was great because I began with God. And I was allowing God to set the agenda of my day, allowing God to set my intentions for the day,

[00:04:25] in the morning hours when my mind was still a blank canvas—when my mind was refreshed and ready for the day. Why not allow God to begin by setting our intentions and establishing our steps? And so the Spirit inspired me one day that GREAT was an acronym that stood for gratitude, reflection, exaltation, asking,

[00:04:50] and trusting. And that acronym was dropped in my soul for me. I didn’t intend to write a book out of this, but this was for me because I wanted rhythm. I wanted structure. I wanted to have something that was repeatable and accessible that could be done anywhere. It could be done on a walk, while driving to work, still in bed in the morning, or in a quiet space. It could be done for parents—

[00:05:15] for me, I was a mom—and it could even be done while my kids were interrupting me and I was getting them out the door for school. But I wanted something accessible. And so I started doing that practice, and it was really completely transformative for my life.

Ellen:
[00:05:35] I just love how God used those circumstances—those very difficult and hard circumstances—to not only help you, but now it’s helping so many others as well. Why do you think prioritizing intentional time with God in the mornings is so important?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:05:50] Mm-hmm.
[00:05:55] Yes. Yeah.
[00:06:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because it is our first fruits, if you think about it. When we wake up, we are the most uninfluenced, if you will, by the chaos and the noise of the day. And we are the most like a sponge in the first morning hours. And there’s also— I mean, there’s scriptural evidence of morning prayer as well.

[00:06:20] We see Jesus often waking up while it was still dark to go to a quiet place and pray. I love the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus had spent a very busy day calling disciples, performing miracles, and preaching the Gospel. And that’s the type of day where you’re just going to feel completely zapped, and when you go to bed that night, you might be thinking, “I deserve to sleep in tomorrow.”

[00:06:45] But Jesus knew that he couldn’t give what he didn’t have. And so what did he do the next morning? He rose early while it was still dark and withdrew to a quiet place. Why? Because Jesus knew that he needed—yes, he was fully God, and also he was fully human, which meant that he had human limitations. And so he needed the strength of God to renew him and to propel him.

[00:07:10] And in the morning hour, we’re most tempted these days because we have these little square devices—rectangular devices. Most people, when they wake up, reach for that first and begin the doom scroll. They check their emails, headlines, Instagram or TikTok, their messages. And not everything they consume in those first hours is positive. Some of it causes stress in our bodies.

[00:07:35] Some of it causes anxiety or even makes us feel bad about ourselves and our own lives. And we’re allowing those things to shape our minds with the first fruits of the morning hour—when our minds are a blank canvas. I don’t think we realize how that is setting the trajectory for the rest of our day. I’ll give an example:

[00:07:55] Not too long ago, I was doing morning prayer with my husband. We happened to be doing the routine together that morning. We were transitioning to reading some scripture, and what we do is we have scripture come from the phone on the Bible app. So I reached for my phone and saw something pop up from my email. And instead of going straight to the Bible app, I clicked on my email. My husband said, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, just one second.”

[00:08:20] And it was a work email that was kind of stressful. I gave in to the temptation and clicked on it. And you bet it consumed my mind. We were listening to scripture and going through the prayer, and I was stressed out. I think it would have been very different had I begun with God and gone through the whole routine.

[00:08:40] Then, when I was ready to get into my work while in tune with God, I would have received that email very differently. Think about all the things we consume—humans consume things at a rapid pace because of devices. Consumption isn’t bad; by nature we are consumers. We are meant to consume. We consume the world around us—

Ellen:
[00:09:00] Hmm.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:09:05] We consume culture, we consume what we hear people saying to us. And these days we are spending hours and hours consuming things from devices with algorithms that are set to transform—or deform or malform—our minds. And the Bible says, the apostle Paul says in Romans 12, “Therefore be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And morning is one of the best possible times when our brains are refreshed

[00:09:30] to allow God’s living Word, and to allow the living God, to renew and transform our minds for the day.

Ellen:
[00:09:40] You know, you called our minds blank canvases when we wake up in the morning, and that just really resonated with me. I just hadn’t thought of it in that way before. And it really makes sense—how all of these things are competing for our mind and our attention, and while it’s blank, we can let God be that transformation.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:10:00] Mm-hmm.
[00:10:05] Yeah.
[00:10:10] Yeah.
[00:10:15] Absolutely. Lamentations says that his mercies are new every morning. And we know that’s true because we all have days that are stressful, and we wake up the next morning and think, “I’m not even mad anymore about it. I’m not even stressed anymore about it,” because there is a refreshing and a healing that happens in our sleep.

Ellen:
[00:10:35] Yes.

Ellen:
[00:10:40] Right. Well, praise God for that. I’m actually in the middle of doing a study on Lamentations right now. And I know Jeremiah—they were going through the worst possible circumstances—yet they still had that hope. Well, the Bible, as you said, is full of stories of…

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:11:00] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Ellen:
[00:11:05] …biblical characters that chose to be with God in their first waking moments. What are some examples for you in the Bible that inspired you as you wrote this book?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:11:20] Yeah, yeah. So of course, the example of Jesus is an incredibly powerful one—rising early to be with God in the morning. We see God delivering the people of Israel the manna and the quail in the morning hours. We see examples of David writing in the Psalms

[00:11:40] about how God speaks in the morning hour, how God’s presence is good in the morning hour, and rising with God in the morning hour. And we see people like Moses and Abraham hearing from and experiencing God in the morning hour. There are just so many different examples of God’s goodness—of people

[00:12:00] discovering the goodness and the presence of God in the morning hours.

Ellen:
[00:12:10] Absolutely. Well, let’s talk to the person who’s maybe listening to this. And we can acknowledge that there are a lot of barriers that people have to doing this type of very early morning retreat. How do we shift our thinking to make this possible?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:12:25] Yeah, well, we’ve got to stop saying, “I’m not a morning person,” because—I mean—there just aren’t that many people in this world who wake up easily every single day. I think that when we keep telling ourselves that we’re not a morning person, well, we’re not going to become a morning person. I believe you can actually become a morning person. I’m not saying a morning person who wakes up at 4:30 a.m.,

[00:12:50] but my intent in writing this book was calling people simply to wake up earlier and begin their day with God—whether it’s five minutes earlier or 10 minutes earlier. And so, while this might feel overwhelming, it is a mindset first. We make these decisions the night before. We’re not going to make the decision to become a morning person in the morning, the day of. This is something we do the night before—which means we have a good night’s rest.

[00:13:15] We sleep well, get our seven or eight hours of sleep if possible, whatever your body clock needs. But we need to be people who have rhythms of built-in rest and set our intentions: that we are going to set our alarm clocks for a particular time in the morning to begin with God rather than beginning with chaos.

[00:13:35] So stop saying, “I’m not a morning person.” Say, “I’m going to become a morning person instead.” And eventually you’ll realize, “I am a morning person.” And again, start very small—simply by beginning with gratitude for five minutes. You might simply say, “God, here I am, and here are You.

[00:13:55] I am so grateful for Your presence today. I am so grateful for this warm bed. I am so grateful that I have the privilege to have coffee.” It can be simple. Oftentimes when we think of gratitude, we think it has to be something profound. But man—have you ever asked a child what they’re grateful for? It is so simple and so beautiful. And God delights in that, just as we delight in hearing a child

Ellen:
[00:14:20] Mm-hmm.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:14:25] be grateful for the small things. So start small. You don’t have to start with a 45-minute routine. You don’t have to start at 4:30 a.m. And I want to say to those who have the barriers of children—some people are thinking, “Okay, I have littles at home, and I’m woken up sometimes at 3:30 a.m., 4 a.m., and 4:30 a.m. by the baby monitor. You’re telling me I need to wake up another time?” No. If you’re a parent,

[00:14:50] one of the things we learn is that seasons move quickly, right? Just when we think we have a rhythm, something changes and we’re in a different life stage with our child. So we’ve got to be able to contextualize and adapt routines to where we are in that season. I happen to be in a season where I have teenagers, for example, and they are pretty independent in the morning. So I’m not waking up as early right now; I’m waking up a little later because I don’t need as much time.

[00:15:15] For us—my husband and me—part of our morning routine sometimes looks like praying with our boys. We pray with them every single morning, and we bring that asking portion, those prayers of petition, and do it together. Or if you have a child who is nursing, this is a prayer practice that can be done while you’re nursing or changing diapers. Or, mamas, while you’re

[00:15:40] driving your kids to school, you can turn on praise and worship music and exalt God in the car with your kids. Or it can be done during a morning walk. The hope is simply to encourage people to start their day with God.

Ellen:
[00:16:00] Absolutely. I actually enjoyed doing that yesterday at the gym in the sauna. You’re sitting in there, it’s dark, you can’t bring in any devices, and I’m like, “What a perfect place to begin with God.” Well, Tara, you write that rising early isn’t about grinding through our exhaustion.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:16:20] Mm-hmm.
[00:16:25] Yeah.
[00:16:30] …beginning with God. Yeah, I love that.
[00:16:35] Mm-hmm.

Ellen:
[00:16:40] What encouragement do you have for listeners who want to try this practice, but they’re afraid of failure?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:16:55] Yeah, yeah. Well, this is not a legalistic ritual, and failure—I would say it’s not going to be perfect. And so, if we’re thinking of failure through the lens of perfection, we’ve got to lower our expectations a bit. Because for me, I don’t do this perfectly. I mentioned that I read an email in the middle of the routine.

[00:17:15] But that wasn’t failure—that was “Oops, I’m going to adapt.” There are seasons, especially when we’re on vacation, where I’m not engaging in the routine the same way. I miss it for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. And I don’t see that as failure; I see it as, “Okay, we’re going to pick up where we left off.” And God isn’t disappointed in me, because my morning time isn’t so I can be in favor with God or in His good graces. It’s because I want to be transformed and renewed.

[00:17:40] And I do want to be in the presence of God. So perhaps if you’re afraid of failure, maybe we need to remove perfection as a possibility and instead move toward understanding that this is a new rhythm I want to embrace—and it won’t be perfect. And that’s okay.

Ellen:
[00:18:00] Absolutely. That’s so, so important. And I think sometimes we have such huge expectations that almost become a heavy weight. Like if you want to read through the whole Bible in a year, which is wonderful, but then all of a sudden you’re behind and you just give up. And I feel like the approach you’re suggesting is—yeah—let’s

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:18:20] Mm-hmm.

Ellen:
[00:18:25] let go of having to meet this specific schedule and routine and really get to the heart.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:18:30] Right.

Ellen:
[00:18:35] Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your new book, The Great Morning Revolution?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:18:50] Yeah, The Great Morning Revolution can be found at all your favorite booksellers online—Amazon, Barnes & Noble. It can be found in stores at Walmart beginning in November through January. They’re doing a “New Year, New You” end cap. And so if you go in November to January, you can find it there. Otherwise, you can find it online.

[00:19:10] You can find me—I’m on Instagram and Facebook. Those are the two primary places where you can find me.

Ellen:
[00:19:20] Fantastic. We’ll make sure we include links to all of those in our show notes. Before I let you go, though, I have to ask you our favorite questions here. What Bible is your go-to Bible, and what translation is it?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:19:35] Yeah, so I love the Life Application Study Bible, and I grew up reading the NIV, so I’ve always stuck with the NIV. And I love the Life Application Study Bible because it has built-in commentary right there for you. If there’s ever something confusing, you can just look down and there are paragraphs that help explain the context of what was happening.

[00:19:55] I mean, I’m a commentary nerd—you know, right next to me is just a wall of commentaries—but not everybody has that access to a library of commentaries like pastors often have. And so I really like the Life Application Study Bible because it does such a brilliant job of breaking things down and helping us understand such complex things in Scripture.

Ellen:
[00:20:15] Yes, that is a great recommendation. Okay, do you have any favorite Bible journaling supplies that you like to use?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:20:30] Yeah, so there are different pens and different highlighters you can buy that I really enjoy. I’m blanking on the name, but there are these wonderful highlighters that don’t bleed through—kind of like more crayon-like—and you can purchase them instead of traditional highlighters that bleed through the page. I absolutely love those because I do love marking up my Bible. I do love highlighting my Bible.

Ellen:
[00:20:50] Yeah.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:20:55] I love putting things in the notes after hearing a good sermon—adding the date and notes that are really helpful. And there are some really great pens that won’t bleed through for that.

Ellen:
[00:21:10] Okay, lastly, what is your favorite app or website for Bible study tools?

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:21:25] Yeah, yeah. So my favorite app is the Bible App. My husband and I use it every single morning. I love the little daily teachers they have on there. I love that there is a Bible reading plan. So my husband and I, for example, right now we’re on a Read the Bible in a Year plan. We listen to someone read it to us every morning. It goes from the Gospels to the Psalms

[00:21:50] and then into the Old Testament. It’s just a powerful way—an easy way. You don’t have to think, “Where do I start with reading the Bible?” You actually have a plan right in front of you. I also like FaithGateway—it’s FaithGateway, right? We’re so used to typing things into our browser and it just pops up. But yes, faithgateway.com is another great resource.

Ellen:
[00:22:10] Right, right, right. Yeah.

Ellen:
[00:22:15] All right, well thank you so much for your tips there, and thank you so much, Tara, for sharing your story with us and the really practical way that we can lean into God for support in difficult times. I know this is going to really transform people’s lives.

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:22:30] Thank you.

Ellen:
[00:22:35] And to our listeners, I hope Tara’s words have encouraged you to rethink how you begin your day and to see that the morning is not something you have to rush through, but an opportunity for you to meet with the Lord. Whatever season you’re in, may you be reminded that our God is near and is inviting you to draw close. 

Tara Beth Leach:
[00:22:55] Amen.

Ellen:
[00:23:00]  We’ll see you next time here at the Coffee and Bible Time podcast.