There’s Peace on the Other Side of Obedience

Most mornings, my alarm goes off around 4:00. I’m not going to tell you I jump out of bed fired up and ready to attack the day. Sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I slept like shit. Sometimes staying in bed sounds a lot better than anything I had planned for the morning. I get up anyway.

I don’t think there is anything special about waking up at four. It doesn’t make me more disciplined than the guy who wakes up at six, and I definitely don’t think God is impressed by the time on my alarm clock. Four just happens to be the time that gives me a quiet part of the day before everybody needs something from me.

Usually I take Kona out first. The neighborhood is dark and quiet, and I listen to the Bible while we walk. I come home, make coffee, spend some time reading or doing a devotional, and then the house starts waking up. Harper gets up, Dad mode starts, school happens, and after that I go train hard for about an hour before work takes over.

I’ve grown to love that routine, but the part I value most isn’t the early alarm. It’s the fact that I’m practicing doing what I said I was going to do before the rest of the world has a chance to get involved.

I know the version of myself that wants to negotiate. Five more minutes. Skip today. You trained hard yesterday. Start again tomorrow. Nobody will know. The funny thing is, most of the time nobody would know. There is no audience in my bedroom at four in the morning, and nobody at the gym cares that I showed up.

That is part of why it matters to me.

For a long time, I think I misunderstood obedience. It sounded restrictive, like giving up freedom or doing something simply because somebody told you to. My relationship with God has changed the way I see it. More and more, obedience feels like getting rid of the argument happening inside my own head.

If I said I was going to get up, I get up. If I said I was going to train, I train. If I want time with God before the noise of the day starts, I have to make room for it. I’m not perfect at any of this. I miss things, I get impatient, I get distracted, and I still have days when comfort wins. But I’ve noticed that when what I know I should do and what I actually do line up, life gets quieter inside me.

That is where the peace shows up.

I used to think peace was something I would eventually get when life became easier. I thought it would come when business was good, money wasn’t stressful, there wasn’t another problem waiting on my phone, and I finally felt like I had everything under control. I don’t believe that anymore.

Some of the most peaceful moments of my life now happen while I’m doing difficult things. It can be walking through the neighborhood before sunrise with Scripture in my ears, sitting with coffee and my Bible while the house is still quiet, or walking into an almost empty gym knowing exactly why I’m there. Sometimes it is putting weight on the bar on a morning when I don’t feel particularly strong and doing the work anyway.

I care about the workout itself. I want to be strong. I want to take care of the body God gave me, and I like pushing myself to see what I’m capable of. But training has become useful to me for another reason too. It gives me a place to practice obedience when the stakes are relatively small.

The gym is controlled. The weight is right there. I either pick it up or I don’t. I either finish the set or I stop. Real life is obviously more complicated than that, but there is something valuable about having a place where I can practice keeping a promise to myself when nobody else is watching.

Eventually I leave the gym and go home, and that is where the discipline matters more. I’m a husband, a dad, and a business owner. People depend on me. There are conversations I need to have, decisions I need to make, mistakes I need to own, and days when being steady matters a lot more than how much weight I moved that morning.

I don’t believe God needs me to wake up at 4:00 AM. I think I need to learn how to stop negotiating with the things I already know are right. The early morning and the gym are just two places where I get to practice that.

Your version of this might have nothing to do with an alarm clock or a barbell. It might be getting your health back under control, opening your Bible again, apologizing to someone, putting your phone down when you walk through the door, having the conversation you keep avoiding, or finally taking responsibility for something you have been pushing away.

Most of us already know where we are negotiating with ourselves. We usually don’t need another motivational speech. We need to do the thing we already know we should do and trust God with what comes after it.

I’m learning that peace doesn’t always come before obedience and make the decision easy. A lot of the time, the obedience comes first. The peace is waiting on the other side of it.