Hello, God. It's Me, Randy.

When I began ministry in 1985, I was a father with young children. I was trying to learn how to be a pastor in an unfamiliar place among people I had just met. This afforded me little mental space for spending time in prayer and feeding my soul from Scripture. At a time when I needed to listen to the voice of Jesus, I found it impossible to establish the practices that would allow me to do so.

Having a small house and three early rising children mitigated against even the best of spiritual intentions. The books I read said this was no excuse. Susannah Wesley, mother to John and Charles and a bunch of others, the story went, would put a sheet or something over her head in order to gain some quiet isolation from her houseful of noisy kids for a time of prayer. The books assured me that I should be able to do something similar. And so I tried.

I tried to set up a devotional space in our garage. That worked until the rat showed up. Confronting a rat during one’s quiet time is a fatal detriment to spiritual sensitivity. A time or two I tried stopping in the Wal-mart parking lot on the way to church. It was quiet and undisturbed and rat-free. But it was also uncomfortable and lacked the romance of Mrs. Wesley’s noble sheet. I found that I wasn’t made of the same stuff as Mrs. Wesley. Her story and those of others, whether truth or legend, only added a measure of guilt and shame to my struggle.

Untethered from any regular and vital spiritual practice, I developed as a pastor and as a father without consistent prayer and without hearing the voice of Jesus in Scripture. My excuses were good ones. What I lacked were good models and steady encouragement.

Though I had been blessed with a number of godly mentors, none had ever taken me aside to say, “Let me show you what a devotional life looks like.” Mostly the veil over this part of their lives was impenetrable, and none ever volunteered to let me in.

To be fair, I never asked. But I didn’t think I needed to. I could read any number of good books on the subject, books which, in the end, only tended to oppress me. Sure, Tim Keller¹ had this amazingly vibrant private intimacy with God, and yes, John Owen² could penetrate the fog to contemplate the glory of Christ. But these guys and I live on different planes.

And what the books did not teach me is that there are things worse than lacking a regular devotional life.

The best practical help I ever found came from a discipleship program designed by the Navigators,³ help which guides me still today. To help with the establishment of a habit, the program encouraged me to have a “quiet time” every day for one week. My dopamine-fueled ADHD brain found great pleasure in checking those seven boxes that week. So much pleasure, in fact, that I extended the goal to a month. I was doing it!

And the devil was happy, because he knows that goals can become gods. Unable now to keep me away from a healthy spiritual practice, he sought to spoil the practice by filling it with pride and self accomplishment. As I grew more proud of my accomplishment — two hundred days in a row, then three hundred, then a year — it was no longer a well from which to draw insight and comfort, but a marker of my spiritual worth. When during this period my mother died suddenly, Barb, the kids, and I hustled to drive the 1000 miles to Cincinnati to be with family. We arrived after midnight, and before I would go to bed, I had “a quiet time,” not because I needed a word from Jesus at a moment of deep sorrow, but because I needed to keep a streak intact.

My coming to scripture was no longer from a place of hunger and longing asking, “God, speak to me” but from a place of pride saying, “God, look at me.” Unhealthy things in our lives need to be excised, and so it became clear that the holiest thing I could do was to purposely skip a quiet time. One weekend, at a church campout at the nearby Myakka River State Park, I did just that. Finally, I was free. This good thing which had become a bad thing ceased being a point of pride and obsession and returned to being the thing of joy it was supposed to be.

I’m happy to share what my practice looks like now, should any dare to ask. But the truth is that, unlike Drs. Keller and Owen, rarely if ever are my devotional moments full of awe and intimacy, or of glimpses of the glory of Christ. As well, I still struggle mightily to pray. Nevertheless, without this routine in my life, I’d be lost.

So, you see, I have no moral authority to scold pastors who struggle in this area. I have no noise canceling sheets to sell nor sure-fire methodologies to offer. But as you long to hear the voice of Jesus, I urge you to keep pressing forward in that direction until you do.

1. Tim Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, (United States:Dutton, 2014).

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2. John Owen, The Works of John Owen - Volume 1: The Glory of Christ, (United States: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965).

3. The Navigators is an evangelical para-church ministry with programs designed for those in the military, on college campuses, and in the church. This was their “Colossians 2:7” material.