I am not a morning person. I do a lot of my best work after most of the world has gone to bed and everything is quiet. People are shocked if they see me in the office on a weekday before 10 am, and rightfully so. I don’t make a habit of it. I leave the house extra early on Sunday mornings (although Brian tells me it is just a normal amount of early for him because it is the time he leaves the house every day) so by the time you all see me, I’ve finished off my first 32 ounces of caffeinated hydration and have started another.
For several years, I thought this was something I should grow out of, but that I really didn’t want to. No matter how many months in a row I keep an early schedule, I really don’t become a functional human being until later in the day. It took a long time to accept that it was ok to not be a morning person and that my gifts were better used if I used them at the right time of day.
I felt further validated the other day when I saw a meme that portrayed God creating people and then giving them various gifts - and he made some of them day people to get things done during the day, and some of them alert in the evening. And then humans decided that the important part of the day was the morning and that everything needs to be done early. You can see the meme for yourself above.
We’ve created a whole ethos around what people’s sleep and work schedule should be, and then expect everyone to be at their best when they do it. We even have idioms to go with the idea, like “the early bird gets the worm.” If I got up early to try to get a worm, I would just bumble around, get in peoples’ way, get myself dirty, and then have to deal with the consequences of having lost sleep and the meal (having followed the metaphor to the conclusion that I was to eat this proverbial worm …)
I’m grateful to work where I can use my gifts when I am at my best. And that Dunkin’ Donuts (my worm shop) is open when I’m ready for breakfast.
On the heels of Pastor Lowell’s sermon a few weeks ago about us all being various members of the body of Christ with our varying gifts, this meme helped me take the idea from the reading from Paul one step further to wonder how often we force people into or out of roles based on our human-imposed ideologies.
If I had unlimited space to write, I would explore a plethora of taboos and prejudices, but for now, I’ll just close with some common ways we ask people to conform with our ideals:
- Thinking of people with tattoos as less hireable
- Pushing people to get a degree to be successful instead of learning a trade if that is what they would be good at
- Assuming more hours at your desk means more productivity
- Romanticizing that if you love your job, it never feels like work
These are just some work/career-related biases because that was the path I was on, but there are other ways we ask people to conform to roles we expect them to play in our lives, too. What does that look like for you?
Yours in Christ,
John Johns, Music Director