My sister-in-law has Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome and it has gotten so bad right now that she can’t read most of her textbooks without throwing up or getting headachy. She is at work right now and is under fluorescent lights (SSS hell). She has glasses that are being made but she can’t get them until Thursday (when she has a test in one of her classes). Please pray that she can get through until she can get her glasses and also that there might be a solution to help her salvage the rest of the semester. Pray also for my in-laws because this has been extraordinarily draining for them.

[Disclaimer: These are my feelings on the subject and why it really doesn’t work for me. If doing “quiet times” with God is how you connect spiritually, I am not trying to say that you are wrong or that you should stop. I’m glad it works for you.]

A few days ago, I commented on my disdain for “cookie cutter” quiet times while raging about my faith. I guess I should probably explain why I despise the quiet times that (it seems like) most evangelical churches promote.

When I was in the latter years of my high school career, my friends told me about the practice of “quiet times” which was 30 minutes that you spent with God every day, usually reading a devotional like Campus Journal and then praying. I didn’t really put the practice into place until I hit college and started attending a church that promoted them. 30 minutes was the expectation and people claimed to do 45 minutes to 1 hour and they talked of the amazing results they got. Ummm… yeah. I could barely sit still for the 30 minutes that I started with and actually had to set a timer to make sure that I put my 30 minutes in. It wasn’t the Scripture or devotional reading that was a problem — it was the fact that I couldn’t sit still for that long and pray. The guy in whom I was interested at the time made it into somewhat of a competitive thing to see who could get the most time in and the most out of their time. I started feeling guilty and like less of a Christian because I just could not put in the 30 minutes daily without getting unfocused. I tried things like putting my distractions on pieces of paper and putting them in a bag and then setting my bag far away from me. There was also the “praying through distractions” method. Then there was the ACTS format of praying, which really did not work because I felt like my prayers were simply formulas that I recited every night. My fiancé (now husband of *almost* a year) and I prayed together every night and I finally stopped saying the words because we were repeating the same formulaic words every time. It finally burned me out on devotional life and prayer because I just could not connect with God.

Yes, I am studying to be a pastor. Yes, this means that I should have a static format in place so that I can get my own devotional time in when I’m in the parish. However, I got to the point where I simply could not pray and this scared me. My husband Jon has probably prayed for the last year or two for my soul at times because I frequently just did not have the words to pray. I know that Jon would love if we had husband/wife devotional time and I know that he wants us to have family prayers every night when we have kids. Coming from a family that isn’t Christian and being a very introverted person, those thoughts scare me. Doing the “quiet times” in the way that I was encouraged to is similar. It’s unstructured time where I feel like I have to fill it in somehow and all I end up doing is being conscious of how quiet it is and how I really should be connecting with God and I’m not. This was especially the case when my chapter of IV started having us explore “listening prayer”.

The thing that has gotten me praying again (other than it becoming a necessity that I take everything to the Lord in prayer to avoid getting hospitalized for stomach problems) is doing Morning Prayer in the Lutheran Book of Worship and occasionally doing led prayer times via Sacred Space. Having never really been taught to pray, I actually like being led through my prayers and I find that Morning Prayer especially speaks to the need I have for structure that still leaves me room for freedom. I do use Our Daily Bread also but that serves more to get me thinking about spiritual things, which often leads to me journalling about spiritual things either here, at my candidacy blog, or at my rant journal (which is known only to people I can trust). I also find that I can pray much more freely in the context of liturgy.

My point is this: “quiet times” don’t work for everyone. Some people need punctuated prayer time during the day. Others need to pray for a long time before they rise or before they go to sleep at night. Some find their divine connection through music and others find it while sitting in the middle of a field of sunflowers. The reason I look on them with disdain is that I frequently hear people talking about them as the “only way to reach God” and I really could disagree with that. Christianity is not a cookie cutter faith. It may seem like that, especially from the way a lot of Confirmation classes are taught, but it’s not some forumla you follow to receive eternal life. You could call my Morning Prayer my “quiet time” but really… it’s anything but quiet. I actually *sing* it (which Jon is not to find out about 🙂 ) and I read aloud to myself. It’s also not always half an hour — Sacred Space is 10-15 minutes and Morning Prayer is at least 15 minutes but rarely more than 25 even if I have a lot that I am praying about.

As I said in my disclaimer, if this works for you, keep doing it. It just didn’t work for me and I feel like it shouldn’t be pushed as the be-all end-all way to God. By the end of college, I was finally preaching “quality of time over quantity of time” when people asked how long my quiet times were. I also just really do not like how people use them as a measure of how Christian one is. The Lord speaks to different people through different ways. Scripture is frequently how the Lord convicts me of things and listening prayer is how He works in others. We are created in God’s image, but we are not cookies of the same cutter.