Spiritual disciplines establish routine and stability
If you struggle with creating routine and structure in your life, spiritual disciplines could be one helpful way to do so. When I was starting to home school my kids, I found very quickly that we needed some routine “pillars” in our day. We needed to have something that we did to start the school day - in our case, we did the pledge of allegiance and some copy work. We moved through our morning until around 10am, when we created another pillar - snack time and going outdoors. Later on was lunch and more time outside, etc. Having those pillars in place gave our day structure and stability. Even if everything went off the rails between the pledge and snack time, we knew that we could reset at 10am and get back on track.
Spiritual disciplines can create similar pillars throughout your day, whether you are a stay at home mom, you work from home or at an office, or are retired. Here are some suggestions:
Take a walk after lunch and pray for yourself and others.
Step away from what you’re doing mid morning and mid afternoon and take a pause - a minute to pray and breathe and lay your cares at Jesus’ feet.
Read or study the Bible in the morning.
Read the Bible before bed.
Memorize Bible verses while you’re in line at the grocery store, doctor’s office, or school pickup line.
Journal and reflect on Sunday afternoons after church.
Attend church regularly.
Pray while taking a shower.
Pray before bed.
Reflect on the day before going to sleep.
Why is all this helpful? It keeps us thinking about the things of God and focusing on Him throughout our day. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the activities of the day and forget that God wants to walk moment by moment with us. We are designed to have God intertwined into every aspect of our lives, not just on Sunday mornings.
I’ve seen in my own life that when I spend time with God in the morning and then don’t have these spiritual disciplines as pillars throughout my day, I tend to promptly forget everything I talked to God about that morning. I’ve always found the lives of monks interesting because of how they have set times of prayer during the day. Not a bad idea!
However, the challenge in having set times of prayer and study and such is that it can easily become a rote, mindless, going trough the motions, rather than a meaningful time of connection to God. We always have to fight to keep our minds and spirits engaged and to keep our practices Spirit filled and not a checking of a spiritual box. Spiritual disciplines don’t get us “brownie points” with God or make us more loved by God. We are fully loved and fully righteous through the blood of Jesus, not as a result of works.
But, when we do stay engaged, these practices can help us to stay focused on God throughout the day and help us to grow in our faith, replacing lies with truth from God’s Word.
What “pillars” of spiritual disciplines do you have in place? Which ones would be helpful to add?