At half past four the alarm goes. By five the kettle is on and the lunch boxes are packed. By twenty past, the children are being shaken awake and pushed towards uniforms laid out the night before. At a quarter to six the family is standing at the gate, waiting for the car or the first taxi, because the school is in town and the work is in town and the house, the one they could afford, is forty minutes and one very bad road away.
They will get home after dark. The house they worked so hard to buy will mostly be a place they sleep.
This is a common story, in Kingston and Port of Spain as much as in outer London or the suburbs of Toronto. Housing near jobs and schools is expensive, so families move further out for more space or a lower price. It is often a reasonable decision. But it has a cost that does not appear on any mortgage statement: the mornings.
The morning as the first room of the day
The psalmist speaks of the morning as a time of unhurried attention to God:
“In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.” (Psalm 5:3, NIV)
Laying requests before God and waiting expectantly takes a little room. Not hours, necessarily, but some margin: a few minutes at the kitchen table with a Bible open, a prayer said with the children before they leave, a walk to the gate that is not a run. Jesus himself, according to Mark, rose very early, while it was still dark, and went to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35). He did not do that in a rush.
Many families find that their mornings have no margin at all. The house is laid out for sleeping and leaving. The day starts in traffic. Family devotions are postponed to the evening, and in the evening everyone is too tired.
Counting what the commute costs
When people compare houses, they usually compare price, size, security and the look of the neighbourhood. Fewer sit down and work out what the location will do to their daily life. It can be a revealing exercise:
- How early will each person need to leave, and how late will they get back?
- What will fuel, fares or car maintenance cost each month? Does that eat into the savings from a cheaper house?
- How will the journey be in the rainy season, or when the road floods?
- Who will be home when the children get back from school?
- Will anyone have the energy for church, youth group or a Bible study midweek?
None of these questions has a single right answer. A long commute may be worth it for a house with a garden, a safer street, room for Grandma, or the chance to own instead of rent. But it is worth choosing it with open eyes.
Making room, wherever you live
Most of us cannot move house to fix our mornings. But the house we are in can often be arranged to give them back a little.
- Move the rush to the night before. Uniforms, bags, lunches and keys by the door at bedtime. Five calm minutes in the morning are worth fifteen frantic ones.
- Claim a corner. A chair by a window, a stool on the verandah, a spot at the end of the table. A place that says, without words, “this is where I meet God”.
- Pray at the gate. If there is no time to sit, there is always a moment at the door. A single sentence of blessing over each child as they leave can become a lifelong memory.
- Use the journey. Some families pray or listen to Scripture together in the car. Others keep the radio off for the first ten minutes.
- Protect one morning a week. Saturday or Sunday, a breakfast with no hurry and no screens, where the family actually sees one another.
When the next move comes
If you are thinking of buying or moving, it may be worth adding a question to the list alongside bedrooms and budget: what kind of mornings will this house give us? Consider a couple who choose a smaller townhouse close to work over a larger house two parishes away. On paper, they are getting less. In practice, they gain an hour and a half a day, the chance to walk the children to school, and a breakfast table that is actually used. Another family might weigh the same choice and rightly go the other way, for the sake of a garden or an ageing parent nearby.
The point is not that one choice is holy and the other is not. It is that a home is more than square footage. It is the shape of a family’s days, and the mornings are where those days begin. Psalm 5 imagines someone who can lay their requests before God and then wait expectantly. It is worth choosing, and arranging, our homes so that there is room to do that.
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