The Best Part of the Day

“And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” — Mark 1:35 (ESV)

After everything — the prison, the conversion, the giving up of salary, the orphan houses fed by prayer for years — one of the most useful things Müller ever learned was almost embarrassingly ordinary. He learned to get up earlier.

Here’s how it happened. Müller had weak health and frayed nerves, and he’d reasoned, sensibly enough, that resting more would help — so he slept in later and took naps after lunch to spare his tired mind. It seemed like self-care. But he noticed his soul was suffering. Again and again, the day’s demands crashed in before he’d had real time to pray or read his Bible, and he spent whole days spiritually “lean,” running on empty.

Then, staying with a friend in Plymouth in 1839, he heard a remark that changed his routine for the rest of his life. His host was talking about the sacrifices in the book of Leviticus — how God wanted the best of the animal, not the leftovers — and said that in the same way “the best part of our time should be especially given to communion with the Lord.” Müller heard it like a door opening. He’d been giving God the leftover, foggy end of his attention, whatever was still awake after the day had taken its cut. So he made a decision: “whatever my body might suffer,” he would no longer let the most precious part of the day slip away while he lay in bed.

He started getting up early — allowing himself around seven hours of sleep, no more — and giving that first, fresh, quiet stretch of morning to prayer and Scripture before anything else could touch it. He gave up the after-dinner naps too. And here’s the twist he did not expect: his health got better, not worse. He came to believe the very worst thing for his weak nerves had been lying in bed longer — that the extra sleep had been keeping him weak, not healing him. Body and soul both improved once God got the best of the day instead of the dregs.

Now, Müller is careful and so should you be: he doesn’t hand you a rigid rule. He says people need different amounts of sleep, that too little is its own mistake, that you shouldn’t run yourself down. This isn’t about bragging over how few hours you can survive on. It’s about one honest question: who, or what, gets the best part of your day?

Be real about your own version of this. For most people now the first waking act isn’t prayer or thought — it’s the phone. Before your feet hit the floor, the notifications, the feeds, the noise of a hundred strangers have already claimed your freshest, most alert minutes. By the time you’d get around to anything deeper, you’re already scattered, already reacting, already running on the emotional leftovers. Müller’s enemy was a warm bed; yours is a bright screen. The principle is identical.

What he discovered is that the shape of a whole day is often set in its first half hour. Give that half hour to God — quiet, Bible, prayer, before the world gets its hooks in — and you meet the day’s trials with something in you instead of nothing. Give it to the noise, and you spend the rest of the day trying to catch up to yourself.

This is where a life like Müller’s actually gets built. Not mainly in the dramatic rescues, but in the boring, repeated decision to give God the best of your time before anything else can spend it.

One thing to do tomorrow morning: before you touch your phone, give the first ten minutes to God — Bible open, or just praying, in the quiet. Not after you scroll. Before. Do it once and feel the difference in the day; then do it again. That single reordered half hour, kept up, is the quiet engine under everything else you’ve read in this book.