Monday, January 2, 2012

Quiet! I Need Time!

Over the past months, I have wondered what it means to start and to keep a “quiet time.” I used to see people at camp or at the Christian university I attended describe lengthy and complicated ways to spending time with God. Though my desire was still there, this type of a quiet time was a turn off. Later, my dad told me that he didn’t have “quiet times” very often. Yet he is a Godly man. Maybe I don’t need to jump through this hoop after all. But I still wondered, “if I want to meet with God, and I do, and if God wants to meet with me, and He does, why is it so hard for me to do it?”

“Quiet time” does not have a definition except that, if you want to have one, you need to spend time in quiet. Having your quiet time at a rowdy football game might be difficult, because it is neither “quiet” nor do we have undisrupted “time” to spend with God.

However, as Gary Thomas asks in his book Sacred Pathways: Discover Your Soul’s Path to God, “was my friend’s method of walking by the bay any less holy than my method of praying through a list of family members, fellow Christians, foreign countries, and friends who didn’t know the Lord?”

I would say ‘no’ because doing any or all of these things requires ‘time’ and uninterrupted ‘quiet.’ Though I have thought for many months about what a true quiet time might look like, I am realizing that the answer to this question has such an easy answer – whatever works for you.

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