Making Quiet Time In The Chaos

Life in 2,600 sqft with eight people and two large dogs is anything but quiet. At best, it’s a dull roar, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way. This roar is my joy. It’s the sound of life being lived by the people I love most in the place we’re blessed to call a comfortable- albeit tight squeeze and short on storage space- home. It’s the sound of love, life, and happiness. But if I’m honest, the introvert in me desperately needs to be ready for that roar to begin in order to handle it well. That’s where my quiet time happens.

My priorities are not what I say they are. They’re what I do.

What IS “quiet time” for me? It’s quiet. It’s the physical silence I preserve for myself to feed my soul and prepare for my day. Specifically, it’s when I wake up before everyone else in our home, get a big glass of water and my morning vitamins down the hatch, start a coffee brewing, then sit down with my Bible, a book, and my planner, and get my spirit fed, mindset prepped for what my day will require, and get ready. In the colder months, I snuggle up in a blanket on the couch, spend time reading the Bible, praying, going over a chapter or so in an uplifting book(currently working through Praying The Names Of God by Ann Spangler), and getting my to-do’s, meal plan, and priorities written down for the day in my planner. In the warmer months, I’ll move it all to the front porch swing or a chair or hammock on the back porch. After all that, I exercise, shower, and get dressed just in time for my people to begin descending the stairs for the day.

I’m asked often how I can possibly make the time in my day for quiet time. The answer is simple: I just do. I want it, it’s a priority, so I make it happen. And yet in many life stages it’s not really simple at all. The fact remains, though, that I have come to make it a priority so I do what it takes to make it happen, because my priorities are not what I say they are. They’re what I do. I can say I wish I had time to read my Bible, exercise and take better care of myself, or XYZ other things, but in reality I do have the time. I just have to choose to do that with my time. So every day I set my alarm for 5am, and I do it. My family is a bunch of early risers, so I have to be ready for them to start coming down the stairs by 6:30am, and I have fine tuned my morning routine to be what I need and feel ready when the roar begins to build.

WHY is quiet time so important to me? For starters- like I mentioned, I am an introvert. I need the quiet to get energized and ready for what the rest of my day requires of me. Secondly- because my God sustains me, and starting my day with Him is like nothing else. I was raised believing God was an iron fist of justice and truth, ready to flatten you the moment you crossed the line of sin, because if you sinned you deserved it. I wasn’t interested in learning about that God, only teetering the line the make sure I didn’t get it too wrong and bounce into Hell at the end. But through the course of life I met and got to know a different God. Well, the same God, but I got to know Him for myself not for whom He was presented to me as a child and teen. He’s not an iron fist in the sky. He’s not waiting for me to mess up so He can wallop me with I-told-you-so’s and shoulda’-listened’s. He’s my father. He loves me more than I can understand. He is my biggest cheerleader, who wants nothing but goodness for me. He disciplines when necessary, yes, just like I do for my children whom I love, but the more I’ve dug in to the Bible and learned about God for myself, the more I have seen His true character, and THAT is a God I want to know about, want to start my day with every single day, and it blesses me every single day to may that a priority.

So about those kids…. How do I keep them in bed? When they were much younger, an “Okay to wake” clock. You don’t get out of bed until the clock glows(set for 7am). Now that all but one of them are 5 and up I have the luxury of saying they cannot come out of their rooms until I turn the hall light off outside their bedrooms, and they listen. The baby is, of course, still a baby, and my husband is in complete support of my early rising so he is happy to keep her snuggled and happy(hopefully asleep) until I’m done. Yes, sometimes it means he has to be up with her at 6am to give me time, but he’s happy to do it because he values my relationship with God and my spiritual and physical health, too.

So how do you make time for quiet, for planning, for spiritual health, for physical care, for getting yourself ready to face the day, whatever it has in store for you? Mine is not optional. It’s necessary to me, my husband supports it, and my children are required to respect it. And sometimes the baby has been up too many times during the night so I just shut off the 5am alarm, and sleep until the last moment, but those days are few and far between, because I have come to treasure those quiet mornings with God.