Quiet days

I want to quote you something that has helped change my life these past few months, 

"Just as I found God in my friends and in my children, I realized that a meal could become a quiet time.  Through my awareness of and gratitude for oatmeal with brown sugar, figs, and oranges, or mixed green lettuce and mushrooms, or horseradish sauce on a thinly sliced filet.  I deeply reflected on the good nature of God.  I truly learned what it means to 'taste and see that the Lord is good' (Psalm 34:8).  We get so prescriptive with the spiritual life.  We pre-package what it means to have quiet time, and then we duplicate it, mass-produce it, insist upon it, and brag about it.  We make it a formula: thirty minutes in the morning, prayer that includes adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, and then, of course, we journal." 

(Looking for God, Nancy Ortberg)

This has brought me so much freedom.  For years I have got up every morning and spent my time with the Lord.  Those hours spent pouring my life out and searching for directions on the pages of my journals changed my life no doubt but they also became something that I was dependent on.  It was a great feeling to be so dependent on your time spent with the Lord.  It wasn't until that time or my availability to have that time was taken away that I realized a relationship with God and the strength I found in him had to come from something so much more than a scheduled quiet time.  I have begun to see that God is all around.  There are chances to praise Him all day.  There are ways to honor Him in all I do.  I don't have to sit down and have thirty minutes in the morning to get a check mark from God.  I have to raise Godly children.  I have to honor him when dealing with difficult people at the grocery.  I have to give to those less fortunate than me and so on.  Encountering God happens all the time, He does not live in a box or sit at at table and wait for my prayer journal time to begin.  Instead He walks beside you all day long, He guides you, and He holds you.  No more guilt when, after being up all night with a newborn, you can't make it to your thirty minutes in the morning.  No more beating yourself up over empty pages of a prayer journal. There are so many ways to meet with and experience God.   Find what works best for you and do it and remember that life changes and so do the ways you meet with the real and living God.  He wants to know you.