Recently I’ve been learning what it actually Means to spend time with our God. Sometimes it can be a daunting idea, trying to spend one on one time with the creator of our entire existence. And while that is what we’re doing, we’re also spending time with a loving Father. So… what’s that actually supposed to look like?
For a long time, that meant me digging into His Word and studying ideas, because bringing up new questions or finding answers to old ones brought me more intimacy with Him. At some point along the way, like most of us, I decided to get more organized about it. Here in Ethiopia, that looked like making sure I was waking up early everyday, checking off parts of a reading plan I was following, and making sure I was journaling about anything and everything I had been reading. And it was great for a while, and after that…. well, to be blunt it sucked.
I think there’s a few reasons for this. The first being that I just got burnt out. I was trying to make more rules for my relationship with Jesus, when in fact He came down and broke all of the rules. So why would I try to remake them? I don’t make rules for my best friend and I, so why would I make rules for Jesus? It just doesn’t make sense. The second reason is because I became dissatisfied with this sort of connection. I believe that as we continue to grow in a relationship with the Lord, certain things will satisfy us less and less. When I first became a Christian, just reading the Word every once in a while was enough, but eventually I needed more. I fostered a hunger for the Lord that gradually became deeper and wider.
After I became burnt out on my time with the Lord I came to Him wondering, “I want to spend time with you, so why does it feel like it’s a chore now?” And He revealed something to me: He and I are in a Father-Son relationship, in which I’m His Son. So why am I trying to run our Father-Son times? That doesn’t make sense.
In all seriousness, I don’t know anything. Me trying to tell the Lord how our time together will look like is going to end in failure because of that. I’m now trying to let Him take the reigns more and let me know what He wants me to do with our time together. That’s been strange at times. I’ve had moments where I sat down to pray or to read and He’s told me no, and to go do something else. When I’ve asked Him why He tells me things like, “Go play with the kids. You’ll always have me, but these kids won’t have you for much longer,” or “That person needs your help, so let’s help them together.”
Following His commands is leading me to actually spend more time with Him, and is showing me how He is not limited to the bindings of my Bible. I’ve now learned that while reading the Bible can be and is spending time with the Lord, spending time with the Lord is not just reading the Bible. It’s not even just sitting down for hours on end and praying. It’s just living with Him. In the big and the small, in the ups and the downs, He wants us to spend time with Him in all of it.
