With the arrival of Lily (our third child) on October 30th, life has been full around the Mellinger home! I have pretty much been operating in survival mode the past few weeks…making sure everyone is fed and clothed and the sick are tended to. Not much is getting done beyond that. My regular routine of getting up early so that I can have extended time with God went out the window the day we returned from the hospital. But just because I’m in a busier season where I can’t have a consistently long quiet time first thing in the morning, doesn’t mean that I need lose the discipline altogether.
One of the things I learned from Carolyn Mahaney when Jared and I were at the
For example: Maybe Plan A is 30 minutes of Bible reading, devotional-type reading, and prayer. Plan B might be only 10 minutes long – enough time to read a chapter of the Bible (or read a meditation on the Bible from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening) and take a few minutes to pray.
Plan B is simpler and shorter, but it’s still taking time to feed my soul and acknowledge my need for God’s help. The value of having a plan B is that it can help avoid the temptation to completely scrap our quiet times just because we don’t have as much time as we would like.
Can a Plan B ever become a Plan A? Could there be a temptation to settle for Plan B because its more convenient than Plan A? Sure. That’s where the oversight of our husbands and the accountability of ladies in our fellowship group can help us work against letting busyness overtake spiritual disciplines. But I find that one of the benefits of a Plan B is that it tends to keep my heart longing for more time with the Lord in the morning, not less.
So although you may not have new baby in your house, having a back-up plan for your quiet times may be helpful when the unexpected comes your way (as it inevitably does) and you find yourself in a time crunch.
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