Mark 1:35,39 — And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed… And he preached in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and cast out devils.

Myra and I have been reading “Life Together” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a sort of bedtime devotional. In it he talks about “The Day Alone” and puts side by side the ideas “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community” and “Let him who is not in community beware of being alone”.
This morning we were talking about quiet time, and a related thought struck me. If I cannot listen to God in my quiet time I’m going to struggle to listen to Him in my daily life. If I don’t “practice the presence of God” in my daily life I might not hear from Him in my quiet time.
On the one hand there’s the thought that the time I spend alone with God, opening my heart to Him, trying to line up my will with His, is what fuels my day.
On the other hand there’s the thought that if I try to exclude God from the rest of my life (as though I could!) what are we going to have to talk about?
This might be one of my biggest struggles in my own Christian walk. All too often in my quiet time I struggle to focus. “What should I be thinking about Lord? Who should I be praying for today? What was that You said Lord? Let me start again ..,” And then during the day when there are those times when I realize that it’s been a while since I stopped to pray, or thought about God at all … And I have to stop, take a spiritual breath.
It may be that this is a particular problem for men. We are natural compartmentalizers. Work in one compartment, family and finances in another, church and faith in yet another. Is it obvious that we can’t put God in a box? But how hard we try … Or how little we try not to …
So what’s the magic answer? Well, of course there isn’t one. There are things that help, but the bottom line is that, like so much in Christian life, it’s a mystery. Somehow it’s about the developing relationship between me and God. And like all relationships it can feel tidal, like the sea — sometimes closer in, sometimes further out. But (and maybe this is one of those “man” things) sometimes in my quiet time it all clicks, and sometimes the day just flows.
And maybe this is a man thing too … But for me, the things that seem to help are the obvious — consistency, priority, practice. So I do my best to take my quiet time every morning early. I try to remember to look to the Holy Spirit for guidance. If I miss one discipline, the other one works less well. If I try to raise my game in one, I feel the benefit in the other. Me and God — alone together.