Morning Ritual for Writers: Why You’re a Morning Person After All

This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 103.

Do you consider yourself a morning person? If you’re picturing a 5 a.m. alarm, a half marathon, and harp music in the background, we get why you’d say no. But our guest this week, bestselling author and speaker Jennifer Dukes Lee, makes a case that you might be a morning person after all.

Jennifer lives on a fifth-generation family farm in northwest Iowa, and she’s spent a lifetime in words, from newspaper reporter at sixteen to about ten books. Her latest, How to Love Your Morning, grew out of studying more than 200 mornings in Scripture. Our conversation covered farming seasons, morning rituals, and what it looks like to build rhythms that make room for God, our writing, and the life happening around us.

A Quick Word on Social Media

Our icebreaker is always the same: what’s your relationship with social media? Jennifer’s answer was refreshingly honest. She loves it. She sees it as a playground and a laboratory, a place to test what resonates and encourage people right away. She’s written on social nearly every weekday since 2009.

That answer is welcome here. Our message has never been that everyone must quit. If a tool is working for you, keep doing the thing. We just want writers to discover pathways to their readers beyond one platform, so they aren’t putting all their eggs in one basket.

What Farming Teaches Us About Creative Seasons

Jennifer’s answer about farming on Annie F. Down’s podcast That Sounds Fun stuck with Sandy for weeks, so we asked her to unpack it here. Farming metaphors aren’t new, of course. Jesus used them constantly. But Jennifer says she didn’t truly understand them in her heart until she lived them.

“You cannot plant and harvest on the same day, for one,” she says. Seeds go into the ground by the millions, and sometimes it’s a week before you see even a flicker of green. Writers know that feeling: we plant something and want to get on our knees and beg it to hurry up. Then comes the lush, green summer we’re all hoping for, and then the harvest, when the essay finally publishes or an agent shows interest.

And then comes winter. Jennifer points out that for one quarter of the growing year, nothing is produced on a farm. Our culture, she observes, tends to skip winter entirely, rolling from spring to summer to fall and back again. But winter gives us something no other season can. “Those are the seasons when our dependence on God grows,” she explains, “and when we feel his faithfulness and his presence, sometimes more than any other season.”

That message landed like a deep exhale. The God who designed the seasons built a rhythm of producing and resting right into creation, and he shows it to us every single year.

God Is a Morning Person

So what surprised Jennifer most in her study of 200-plus mornings? Simply this: she discovered that God is a morning person. She had always skimmed past mornings in Scripture as mere timestamps, but a remarkable number of the Bible’s biggest moments unfold at daybreak.

The first thing God created was light. Abraham set out early with Isaac. Jacob woke with a limp and a blessing. Jesus was crucified on a Friday morning, and he walked out of the grave on a Sunday morning. Weeping may last for the night, Jennifer reminds us, but joy comes in the morning, and God’s mercies are new every morning. The evidence, she says, is clear: God has a soft spot for mornings.

You’re a Morning Person Too

Jennifer makes the bold claim that everyone is a morning person, and a few skeptics in the room (okay, us) had questions. Her answer was freeing. We tend to confuse “morning person” with “early bird.” Being a morning person isn’t about the clock. It’s about waking up and deciding to choose hope.

Night owl or early bird, you were made in the image of a God who loves mornings. And naming yourself matters. Jennifer is direct about it: “If you see yourself as a non-morning person, you’re going to enter the day defeated before you even begin.” Her conclusion has stuck with us: “Being a morning person isn’t a clock thing, it’s a God thing.”

Routine vs. Ritual

One of our favorite shifts in the book is the language. Jennifer swaps routine for ritual, and the difference is more than semantics. Routine, to her, feels performative. A ritual feels holy. She points to a candlelit Christmas Eve service as an example: simple, quiet, and sacred.

Her own mornings prove the point. She brews coffee beside a refrigerator list of people she’s promised to pray for, so her coffee ritual and prayer ritual are one. Hair sticking out, contacts not in, maybe a little cranky, she still greets God. “Even in my bare feet, in my nightgown, in my kitchen with crumbs on the floor,” Jennifer says with a laugh, “it is sacred.”

Mary K. has caught herself declaring, on a groggy morning, that her morning ritual is important and she needs to get out of bed. It works.

The Four Morning Archetypes

After interviewing hundreds of women about their mornings, Jennifer found that no single ritual fits everyone. Instead, she identified four morning archetypes:

The daybreak doer is motivated by productivity and does her best work early. She might start with her calendar and a prayer asking God to help her do good work.
The morning mover needs physical movement to get her mood and metabolism going, like a run or a workout with worship music in her ears.
The social seeker craves connection right away. Jennifer says many kids are social seekers, and so are many widows who didn’t realize it.
The meditative mind needs the Word immediately, often with a Bible and journal beside the bed.

“None of these is better than the other,” Jennifer is quick to point out. We can practice God’s presence in all of them.

Archetypes matter in our community because we believe in playing to your strengths, and that applies to your mornings too. Mary K. is a daybreak doer, and discovering it was freeing. Writing the to-do list first and praying over it meant the quiet time could finally be about Jesus rather than a mental running tally of tasks. Jennifer’s tip for that: keep a distraction list beside your Bible so stray thoughts can be offloaded and you can return to the text. Sandy realized she’s a meditative mind, someone who has to settle with the Lord first, and then bursts into productivity.

What Your Archetype Looks Like for a Writer

Jennifer offered specific ways each type can fold writing into the morning:

Daybreak doers can keep a notepad by the bed for middle-of-the-night ideas, then give God their work and remember that writing can be done to his glory.
Morning movers can take heart from Augustine. “It shall be solved by walking,” Jennifer says, quoting him, and she notes that many of her best ideas arrive on a run.
Social seekers might start a Voxer group or mastermind with other writers, or find a writing buddy to talk through ideas and pray together.
Meditative minds should resist treating Scripture as raw material for a message. Come to the Lord first, she cautions, and let the writing flow from that time.

How Jennifer Protects Her Writing Time

Jennifer’s own rhythm is a masterclass. She also works as an acquisitions editor, so her deep writing happens on Mondays and Fridays in long, uninterrupted blocks. Those days start with a workout, her coffee and prayer rituals, a candle lit with a real match, and reading through the Bible. Then she heads to her desk, flips on the treadmill, and writes. She drafted her entire book while walking.

The treadmill has a bonus: it keeps her off her phone. “If I pick it up now, I’ll fling off the back of the treadmill,” she jokes.

Four hours is her usual max, and at five o’clock she turns off the lights, closes the door, and says goodnight to her office. Her shut down routine is intentional: “There is never an end to the work, but there has got to be an end to the day.” (Sandy heard Jennifer share this on her podcast years ago and adopted the “bye office” ritual immediately.)

Starting When Your Mornings Are Chaos

What about the writer whose mornings are a whirlwind of kids, caregiving, and worry? Jennifer says we can’t wait for perfect conditions, or we never will. Start by deciding to seek God and choose hope today, and say it out loud.

She offers two companions. Mother Teresa recommended that the first words of the day be “Good morning, Jesus.” And Brother Lawrence, the sixteenth-century monk, found God’s presence as real in the clatter of kitchen pots as at communion. If he could meet God there, Jennifer reasons, so can a mom in a noisy kitchen.

As for the writing itself, her counsel is firm: “Treat it like a job, because it is.” Stop calling it a hobby. Give it honor, dignity, and respect, because the world needs your words now more than ever.

Embrace the Season You’re In

We gave Jennifer the last word, and it’s a good one for any weary writer. Whether you’re in a spring where nothing seems to grow, a summer where you worry about storms, a harvest that’s nearly over, or a winter where your work feels invisible, Jesus is your light and your warmth. Scripture says there’s a season for everything, and Jennifer notes with a smile that God makes everything beautiful in its time, not in a hurry or a rush.

So give it time, and let it grow.

This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.