Last night, when I came home from work, I sat down at our family computer. When I opened up Firefox, the page it was resting on had a very unexpected title. Here is what my wife had been looking at:
“Jalapeno Burn Treatment Tips”
I love my wife’s cooking, but I want to be honest, that scared me a little about dinner. That was not the most awesome advertisement for what was about to go down on our dinner table. So I asked my wife what happened. Her response?
“I got jalapenos in my nose and it burned for a few hours. So I had to snort milk to make it feel better.”
Oh, when you say it that way, that makes perfect sense. Snorting milk, sure, sure, who hasn’t done a bump or a line of some 2% before? Of course! Silly me.
What I love about that whole situation is that we were having company over last night. Not old friends, new friends from work, and yet here was my wife, getting all fusion and experimental with hot peppers. I love it!
She’s not afraid to mix it up and try something new, but I am. Especially when it comes to my quiet times.
I think we’ve retired that phrase, like the phrase “Sunday School,” which is apparently reminiscent of some kind of Southern Baptist Torture Chamber. But I still say, “quiet time.” I’m old school like that. And when I do a quiet time, I am wildly inflexible.
Here are the conditions that have to occur perfectly for me to feel like I’ve had a good quiet time:
1. Time of Day
As we’ve said before, God is a morning person and satan is a night owl. I can’t do quiet times at night. I have to do them before work and before the rest of the world wakes up. 6:30AM? That’s perfect. 7:05AM? Horrible, the day is almost over. I can’t do a quiet time that late.
2. Materials
My quiet time regiment is pretty elaborate. I like to read the Bible. Then I journal a little. Then I read a book. Then I journal some more. Then I pray. Then I might listen to some music. There are approximately 27 steps in my plan and it’s as complicated as disarming a bomb. If one step goes awry, if I cut the red wire instead of the blue write, it’s over. I leave the book at home, goodbye quiet time.
3. Location
I used to do my quiet times in my car at work. I would sit in our old Camry for an hour while smokers at work stared at me as if I was some weird guy reading his Bible in the parking lot. Eventually I moved inside to my office. Now that we’ve moved to Nashville, I’m still looking for a good place to do my quiet times. Like a dog turning around in circles over and over again before it sits down, I’m slowly circling Nashville looking for a perfect spot.
4. No disruptions.
When I’m doing a quiet time, my family knows that I am like Superman in his fortress of solitude. Though my kids believe that the perfect time to ask 19 questions of their mother is when she is trying to take a nap, they generally leave me alone when I am doing a devotional.
5. Coffee
Remember in the Bible, when Peter and the gang were sitting on the shores of the Galilee around a campfire? They were all enjoying a cup of warm Judean Joe, just talking about life. Living it! Sipping some coffee and discussing about how to take something “from your head to your heart.” What, that didn’t happen? In my mind it did and that’s why I have a hard time doing a quiet time without a coffee. I’m not even sure I could journal and drink diet Coke at the same time. Journals need coffee and so do quiet times. (Here’s the SCL entry about coffee.)
If even one of these five factors is not perfectly executed, the quality of my quiet time goes down dramatically. The weird thing is that I’m pretty flexible in every other area of my life. I’ll watch an entire movie on my iPhone, turning up the puny volume, squinting to see all the details on that tiny screen. I’ll read other stuff anywhere. I’ll read the back of a shampoo bottle in the middle of a shower just because I want something to look at. I’d sit in a garbage can if it meant I could get tickets to the Vanderbilt U2 show.
But quiet times? I’m wildly inflexible about those.
How about you? How do you do your devotional time?
