Evening + Morning (Part 2): Morning

TO START

This Post-Thanksgiving Week, we want to invite your group to spend time acknowledging that this season is both one of being thankful for what remains and what’s coming while also possibly being sad about what is lost or missing in this season. We’d like for y’all to spend time responding to these two prompts to start group:

  • What is one thing that you’re thankful or grateful for in this season?

  • What is one thing that you’re grieving or missing in this season?

TO DISCUSS

This week, we closed a 2 part series where we dwell with a beautiful rhythmic pattern of evening and morning reflected in the Hebrew Bible and created for you and for me. The hope is that through this series we can lean into practices where we let the visible world remind us of the invisible God who surrounds us. 

Read Mark 1:35-39

  • Do you find parallels with how Jesus approaches his morning and how you approach your morning? If you don’t, what could be a potential practice or rhythm that you could mimic? 

In the sermon, Zane pointed us to 5 specific ways to approach our mornings to draw strength from God and direction from God. We invite y’all to spend time talking through each of the 5 below & we encourage everyone to find one practice to try! 

  1. Wake Up To Scripture 

    • What’s the first thing you tell yourself in the morning? How might starting with the Bible change your direction for the day?

  2. Show Up To Prayer

    • How could you visualize your day changing if it began with prayer? (if someone’s struggling to visualize, encourage them ask for help from Small Group Leader, Minister, Elder or another Mentor) 

  3. Link Up What You Crave & Avoid

    • Is there something that you could link with prayer that you enjoy that could nudge you into making prayer a habit?

  4. Set Up Mental Junk Drawer

    • How do you tend to order the checklist of things you have for each day? What if you created space each morning as you prayed to write down the things you need to do and then you set it aside going back to it throughout the day?

  5. Give Up Being The First To Know

    • What’s difficult for you not to be in the loop on first thing in the morning (work, school, news, hobbies, gossip, sports, family drama, politics, etc.)?

TO CLOSE

If you do one of these things in the morning, you might open yourself up to God passing something along through you and you might find yourself refreshed in the moments you previously found exhausting, depressing or anxiety-inducing. To end group, we want to invite y’all to pray the following prayer together which is a modified version of “A liturgy for the ritual of morning coffee/tea” from Every Moment Holy (we encourage you to try this as a part of practice 2 or 3 this week, feel free to personalize it to yourself if you do) . 

Meet us, O Christ, in this stillness of our mornings.

Move us, O Spirit, to quiet our hearts.

Mend us, O Father, from yesterday’s harms. 

From the discords of yesterday, resurrect my peace.

From the discouragements of yesterday, resurrect our hope.

From the weariness of yesterday, resurrect our strength.

From the doubts of yesterday, resurrect our faith. 

From the wounds of yesterday, resurrect our love.

Let us enter today, aware of our need, and awake to your grace, O Lord. 

Matt DeLano