TIME WITH GOD

by Janet Sketchley (reprinted with permission)

I love those quiet times with God, still-soul-times rich with nearness and uncluttered by my words and lists. I often find them on retreat, but they can be part of each day… if I will remember and be disciplined about seeking them.

They’re when I feel most alive, and yet I so rarely stop to enjoy them. The Lord has been reminding me of this through some of my friends’ posts lately:

At Under the Cover of Prayer, Jan Cox wrote:

I think about our ‘busy’ lives and know that our quiet time with God gets left out. But I believe it is the MOST important part of our day. To be wired to God. How else can we live the life He wants? Without His godly spirit flowing through us, how can we deal with our daily lives? (Connected)

At Whatever He Says, Belinda Burston wrote:

Paul and I pray together before work, and I draw strength and comfort from that cherished time. But it’s a different thing to just coming before God with no agenda but to quieten my heart and listen for his. (Confession)

Again at Under the Cover of Prayer, Janice Keats wrote:

We can learn so much by entering into His presence. Maybe just sitting in His presence is enough. He is all we need. Time well spent with God produces a thirst for more—more peace and more of Him. (Be Still and Wait Patiently for the Lord)

Belinda’s post above ended with a familiar Bible passage as phrased in The Message, and I want to close with a portion of it as well. The wording is fresh and puts a new light on it. Drink deeply:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:1-2,)

Janet Sketchley

Janet is a Canadian writer whose passion is fiction. Her unpublished novel, Praying for the Enemy, was short-listed for the 2008 Best New Canadian Christian Author Award. She’s also a wife, mom, daughter, friend, neighbour… trying to balance relationships and responsibilities, and learning how faith applies to real life. Add that to her quirky imagination and love of fiction, and you get stories about everyday women in suspenseful situations discovering more strength than they would have imagined.

Janet writes weekly book reviews and devotionals at her blog, “God With Us: Finding Joy”, and a quarterly fiction column in FellowScript.  http://janetsketchley.wordpress.com