{friday's featured female} :: The Proverbs 31 Woman, vs. 15

I’d like to go through Proverbs 31 verse by verse, but I think I’ll do so in random order!

My husband just got a new job and started a week or so after the wedding. It’s about 45 minutes from our house, and he has to be there around 4:45 AM! I’ve been trying to get up with him and make him some breakfast and lunch for the day. We get up around 3 to get ready. Sometimes I stay up and sometimes I go back to bed for an hour or two before I have to get ready for work. Getting up this early forces us to go to bed early too. Now I have always been a night owl, so this is a really big adjustment for me. It also really cuts into my evening. I come home from work between 5:30 and 5:45 in the evening, make us dinner, then we clean it up. Then we have a tiny bit of time to watch some TV or a movie, then it is already time for us to shower and go to bed. Getting anything accomplished on a weeknight is getting a little impossible! Which leads me to the verse that I’ve been reminded of this week:

Vs. 15- ^"She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.”

Ok, so I am definitely rising while it is still night. And making my husband something to eat. And then….getting on Facebook, reading blogs, and so on….

While it’s nice to have that “down” time to myself, my goal is to use that morning time to get some things done that I haven’t been able to keep up on since going to bed earlier. I think the thing that impresses me the most about the Proverbs 31 woman is her use of time. She doesn’t seem stressed and stretched thin, but, man does she get a lot done! I mean, I know it assumes a lot that to say she wasn’t stressed. I’m sure the Bible just isn’t recording all of the times she went all “Type A” on her family and they avoided her and her productivity at all costs. Or the times she pulled a Martha and yelled at people for not helping her…because, let’s face it: there is no way she did all this stuff and was always totally balanced. But I love her use of the moments that she had to check things off her list. She took care of her family first. Notice she didn’t have servants getting up early to get HER breakfast ready. She got up and fed the family, and fed her maidens before starting her day. Who wouldn’t want to work hard all day with a lady like that? She made sure others were taken care of first. I think that’s a worthy example.

Here are a few of my goals for using my “rising while it is yet night” a little better:

-         Have a quiet time with God (can I admit that I am really bad at this?)

-         Clean up the kitchen after making breakfast

-         Work on a little light cleaning and straightening up

-         Disciplined blogging

-         Eating breakfast

-         And eventually…working out  (Which I hate, but I think early morning would be a great time to get it over with!)

Are you an early morning person? If so, how much do you manage to accomplish in the AM?