I’ve had a struggle for years that just felt I could never overcome. It started with what I would constantly negatively confess, without even realizing it. And that is “I’m just not a morning person”. I didn’t see any harm in saying that, because the truth is, that’s how I felt. I felt like the morning’s were so hard for me, but if you asked me to stay up all night, no problem, I could do that easily.

So, as I was looking at my goals for 2016, I wrote down that 2016 HAS to be different for me in terms of creating healthy habits that will stay with me for life. In looking at my schedule and how things go with 3 small children in the house, I found that finding time to exercise was really difficult. Being a self-professed “night” person, I found that by the end of the day I really had no energy at all to exercise at the end of the day. So I decided to put it on my prayer list to ask for God to help me to wake up at 6 a.m or earlier, in order to do some cardio before I head to work. The first week of January passed, and no matter how many alarms I set, I found myself hitting the snooze button without even realizing it, and not waking up early enough to exercise.

Fast forward another week to when our church started the 21 day fast. I fasted a few food items, but I decided to include in the fast “no media” after 9 p.m. That might not seem difficult for some, but for me, after the kids go to sleep, it seemed to be my time to unwind by watching Netflix, or scrolling through the news, or Facebook, to get updated on the day’s events. So after 9 p.m, I now used that time to pray, read the word, or study the word. That was it. So in doing so, I found that I didn’t mindlessly spend time on media, but I was also falling asleep much earlier than before. By the end of week one of my fast, I found myself waking up BEFORE my alarm rang, and was very rested, awake, energetic, and I had the strength to get myself ready and do a quick workout before work.

The first day I thought, this must be a fluke, because I just don’t wake up like this. And then it happened the next day, and the next. I’m so grateful that God is gracious to hear us, and help us on things that seem so trivial that we don’t think to spend time to pray about it. This was the first time I specifically asked the Lord to help me wake up at a specific time in the morning so that I could exercise. And although it didn’t happen right away, I kept praying and asking God to help me. And He so graciously and creatively did what I thought was an impossibility. So my confession is no longer that I’m not a morning person. I know that I CAN be a morning person. For the thing that you think is an impossibility in your life, try to limit any negative talk you say to yourself about it, be specific with God about what you want to accomplish, and continue to bring it before the Lord in prayer until you get an answer. If He helped me, I KNOW He will help you. ~ Vijoy