I recently published a series about identifying the challenges that get in the way of quieting our souls. And so I wanted to follow that up with some practical ways that I’ve been learning to commune with God in the everyday. There is something sacred about quiet time in the traditional sense, however in some seasons of life, quiet moments grow less frequent than we’d like and we need practices that remind us to invite God to be with us in the chaos. The following practices have been helpful for me in that: 1. A Daily Centering Prayer There is something significant about making space to listen to the truths…
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Creating a Daily Centering Prayer
I’ve found myself revisiting and relearning old truths about who I am and who God is and what this means for how I ought to spend my days. And this can be such a source of frustration for me at times, because while I understand that learning involves mistakes, I don’t like to repeat the same ones. I long for new truths, for bursting growth above ground, but God seems to keep drawing my attention back to my roots. I want to learn efficiently, but God gently guides me toward the slow and steady. I detect the not so subtle ways that our consumer driven, productivity obsessed culture is shaping…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of the Heart
So often when I set out to cultivate space for quiet and recentering I’ve entered into it with my heart chasing after the wrong things. I find myself viewing daily devotional time with a star chart sort of mentality, rather than an earnest desire to be shaped and transformed by God. I set out focused mostly on what I’m doing and how consistent I’m being. But if I am coming to my quiet time with a desire to prove my value and goodness, then I’m not fully understanding what this is about. We have so many other systems of earning and proving ourselves in our lives, that it’s become a habitual way…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Distractions
The world has grown wildly distracted over the last decade. Though not a particularly profound observation, it is an important one because our increasingly distracted existence had all sorts of implications for our overall wellbeing. However of particular concern is the way it is the way it is diminishing our spirituality. So many of us are struggling with desperation for meaning and purpose because our energy and attention is unnecessarily scattered. When we permit distractions to become the guiding force in our lives, we surrender to a reactive life. A life that is composed of one miscellaneous decision/action after another. A distracted life needs the anchor of quiet moments to…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Perfectionism
Quiet moments can become a struggle for me when I allow myself to become preoccupied with doing it the ”right way”. When perfectionism gets in the way of regularly practicing quiet, I am refusing to experience God as an integral part of my days. I’m limiting those quiet moments for recentering to a very particular context and compartment of my life. My sight becomes narrow. If it’s not going to be Bible pages by candlelight, then should I really even bother? It sounds like nonsense because it is, and yet I’ve made that choice many days. And when I do, I’m severely underestimating God’s ability and desire to meet me…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Time
My heart has longed for many years to be more disciplined about carving out consistent spaces in my life for quiet. I’ve sometimes thought it was because I wasn’t putting forth enough effort. I believed that I simply needed to try harder. But when I asked why I was failing and why it was so hard for me, I began to notice some thought patterns that kept preventing or interrupting the daily practice of quiet moments. The first one being the belief that I don’t have the time. Quiet time has often been delayed or deleted from my days when I perceive that time is scarce. What I’ve come to…
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The Importance of Quiet Moments
All my life I had heard of how God wanted to be first in my life. And then I vividly remember a moment sitting in a college class listening to a religion professor give a lecture about how God’s desire was not to be our first priority. I remember a generic list of priorities appearing squeakily across the dry erase board. “God” filled the number one slot and the professor squeaked a line straight through it and proceeded to draw a circle around the list of priorities and told us that that was how God wanted to participate in our lives—not by being first, but by being everything. God’s desire is to consume our…
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Nature Scavenger Hunts
These free printable scavenger hunts are a great tool for encouraging children to immerse themselves in nature and look a little closer at the world around them with deep appreciation. This sort of play magically manages to nurture physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and social growth in children. And they’re fun for adults as well! Our typical day involves a fair amount of time outside and while most of that time is devoted to simple free play, from time to time we’ll take one of our more structured activities or art projects outdoors. My days are currently spent with two two year olds and so I wasn’t sure what the response…
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Rainbow Stickers
Stickers are a wonderful activity for practicing fine motor skills. The boys went through a few months of requesting them every day. But there were two problems: Not all stickers are toddler friendly. Some of them are challenging for me to peel the backing off. And so instead of an independent activity while I wash up the breakfast dishes, it turned into an activity that required my constant hovering and more nimble fingers. Sometimes the speed at which toddlers fly through those $7 sticker books makes me feel like I need to ration them out each day. And then I was at the Dollar Tree and saw the white sticker…
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Play Dough Face Placemats
We’re in a season where I receive multiple requests each day for play dough. While most of our time with play dough is simple free play, I wondered if I could occasionally use that play dough fascination for some sort of play based activity to nurture emotional growth. So, I created these printable play dough mats to create faces together. We referenced our emotion books to pick out emotions to make. If you haven’t made one, you could simply ask them what emotion they’d like to make. Even if the faces don’t quite capture the emotion accurately, it’s a helpful way to recognize the components of each expression. It was…
