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 in my ordinary life.
The mark of quality quiet time for me used to be if I could unearth some profound nugget of a take away that I could carry me through the day. There’s a deep satisfaction for me when that happens, it feels like an indication that I’m doing it “right”. But what I need to remember is that even when the deep revelations don’t come, I’m still doing the important work of tethering myself to the truth. I’m practicing remembering, because I know how prone I am to forget.
For years I’ve thought quiet time had to mean waking before everyone else and settling into the quiet. (But it’s impossible for everyone to wake before everyone else, right?) It’s still a desperate hope of mine to someday cultivate that habit. It sounds dreamy and restorative to my very introverted self. But ordinary quiet moments might be less a matter of quieting our surroundings and more a matter of quieting our minds and adopting a particular posture with our hearts. (This is particularly encouraging to anyone in a season of raising toddlers where quiet is rather scarce.) And those sorts of quiet postures can happen in car rides and over laundry baskets and at meal times and during naps and in waiting rooms and over kitchen sinks and in garden beds.
Quiet moments by candlelight usher me into a unique place of rest. That’s what I envision when I think of “quiet time”. They’re restorative and unhurried moments and I have no intention of abandoning them, but the expectation of them being my normal day to day habit for quiet in this current season is not practical. And I need to find a place where my idealism intersects my reality. These real daily disciplines shape us immensely, no matter how slow or gradual the growth may seem.
For my current season, this has begun to look like making space wherever I can to recognize God’s presence with me, to ponder and meditate on truth, to call out the lies that sneak their way into my thoughts. Sometimes this anchoring is in the form of a podcast or a song. Sometimes it’s going for a long walk or sitting in a rocking chair. Sometimes it’s breath prayers over the sink. Sometimes it’s inviting the little ones I’m surrounded by to join me.
I’m learning to remove the limits of where I believe God can meet me and breathe life into my days. When we begin training our hearts and minds to search for God’s goodness, we often find it in the most unexpected of places. And by “unexpected” I mean common, ordinary, unimpressive places and moments; Beauty, truth, and goodness scattered throughout our lives just waiting to be encountered and recognized, if we would only glance up from our attempts to rigidly control the day with agendas and to do lists.
Train my eyes and my heart to seek your truth with my whole life. Teach me how to quiet myself and the world around me and tune into Your truth. I invite You into all the parts of my day and my life and beyond the limitations of a comfortable space at a candlelit table.
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