Our granddaughter, Noah Kate, is three years old, and she does not believe in sleeping in. Once she’s up, there’s no rest for the weary in her house. She marches into her parents’ room, flips on the light of her own internal alarm clock, and if told to go back to bed, she protests, “But the sun is awake.”
The sun is awake. I’ve turned that phrase over in my mind for days now. “Out of the mouths of babes.”
It reminds me of John Wayne, playing the weathered rancher Wil Anderson in the 1972 film The Cowboys. Anderson has hired a crew of schoolboys to drive his cattle four hundred miles because every grown man in the county has run off to chase gold. There’s no time for a leisurely breakfast on a trail like that. So he barks at his young hands, “Slap some bacon on a biscuit — we’re burnin’ daylight!” It’s not a gentle line, but it carries a truth every rancher, farmer, and grandparent of a three-year-old understands: the day is a gift, and it does not wait around for you to decide whether you’re ready for it.
That’s really just a rougher version of the older adage: “Early to bed, early to rise.” We tend to credit Benjamin Franklin with that one, and he does deserve some credit — he printed it in Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1735 and helped make it a household phrase in America. But the idea predates Franklin. Versions appear in English proverb collections dating back to the 1400s, with one calling early rising a path to being “holy, healthy, and fortunate.” Franklin didn’t invent the wisdom. He just gave it good marketing.
And it turns out the wisdom holds up.
Researchers at the University of Exeter, working with genetic and activity-tracker data from tens of thousands of people, found that those naturally wired to be early risers report better overall well-being and lower rates of depression.
A separate study out of the University of Colorado Boulder and Harvard found that waking even one hour earlier than your usual habit was associated with a meaningfully lower risk of depression — and the earlier, the better.
Researchers at University College London found something similar: people report feeling happiest and most satisfied with life in the morning, with those numbers sliding steadily downhill until they bottom out around midnight.
Noah Kate, in other words, may be onto something the researchers spent years confirming.
But there’s an older witness than any of these. Scripture is full of early risers. The psalmist writes, “In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you” (Psalm 5:3). Mark tells us that Jesus himself, “very early in the morning, while it was still dark, got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). Even the excellent wife of Proverbs 31 “gets up while it is still night” to tend to her household.
Rising early to meet the day, and to meet God in it, is baked into the pattern of a faithful life.
But the sun Noah Kate is talking about isn’t the only sun worth waking up for. The prophet Malachi promised that “the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in its wings” (Malachi 4:2) — a Son, not just a sun, whose light was breaking into the world. John put it plainly: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
No night is long enough to put that light out. No darkness — not in the world, not in a life, not in a heart — gets the last word. The Son is awake. He always has been.
And one day, I hope, Noah Kate will wake up to that truth too.