S1E45: Coffee with Gabi! Is Trying to Have a "Good" Quiet Time Stressing You Out?

Please tell me I'm not the only one who has stressed out about trying to have a "good" quiet time!!

I put "good" in quotes because - where does the measuring stick for a "good" quiet time even come from? This is a question I've asked myself a lot through the various seasons of my life because I began to realize that I thought there was something specific expected of me when I sat down for a quiet time, and if I didn't do those specific things, I thought that maybe I was a bad Christian! You get it, right? We put these stipulations on ourselves thinking things like, "I need to be up before my kids. My quiet time needs to last an hour. Every moment of my quiet time needs to be engaged in something really spiritually rich and focused."

I wanted to record a little podcast episode about this because time with God should be FREEDOM, not bondage, and yet we as humans are reallllly good an putting ourselves in bondage by creating rules to follow that are actually arbitrary. So how do we get back to freedom in our endeavor to spend time with our Creator? What might that look like as a mom with little kids or in different seasons of our lives? How do we practically set ourselves up to both have time with God and to be realistic about what our day-to-day lives look like in our current season?

That's what we're talking about on today's episode, and I think it will encourage you!

Thank you for being here, and as always, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast! It helps tremendously with getting the word out about the show to as many people as possible. :)

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(TRANSCRIPT) - S1E45: Coffee with Gabi! Is Trying to Have a “Good” Quiet Time Stressing You Out?

Note: Transcript is created by AI. Please excuse any errors.

Gabi: Hey, loves, how are you doing? I was not able to do a Coffee with Gabi episode last week because I needed to do some things to take care of myself, and I hope by me saying that, which I know I've said before, helps to give some of you permission to be a little bit imperfect too. When you are trying new things and chasing dreams, and especially when you're really kind of running on your own with creating something new, sometimes it's just not gonna be perfect.

Sometimes your mental health and your rest is going to take priority over perfection, and that's okay. Just keep moving forward. Don't quit completely. Okay. That's not what I wanted to talk about today, but I felt like it was important to say, so there's an extra little tidbit for you now. If you wanna have coffee together, you can pause this episode, go grab your favorite latte, come back, and we can sit across this virtual table and spend some time together.

These are some thoughts that I've been having today that I wanted to share with you, and those thoughts are for those of you who are moms, and you just wonder like, how on earth do I have a quiet time? Or it could be for those of you who are not moms and you hear this term quiet time thrown around and you're like, I don't know what that means, or perhaps you have some kind of standard of a quiet time that you feel like you cannot meet.

So let's just talk about this a little bit now in the Christianese world. What that means is the church world where we use words that don't really make sense to other people. Quiet time basically refers to a period of time, usually in the morning where you spend some time with God. And I know that this was something that really hung me up.

For a while, especially as an adult, especially as I started having children. Because there was this kind of standard, unspoken, in some ways, spoken in some ways, but the standard that a quiet time should be like early in the morning, set aside time where you have no distractions. You read your Bible and you pray, and if you do that for an hour, you are particularly holy.

And listen, I'm that girl who really wanted to be holy, really, really like I am a Jesus girl. Through and through. I'm sure you all know that by now. But having that time got harder and harder, the more responsibilities that I had. And then of course, the more people that I had that I was responsible for.

So I've learned some things along the way that have really felt liberating to me because the purpose of a quiet time is not so you can check some box. It's not so you can mark something off your to-do list. It's not something that God in heaven is looking down and checking his watch and thinking. Hmm, it's 7:30 AM and you're busy and you haven't had a quiet time yet.

I don't know if we can really hang out today anymore cuz that was our time. Like that is not actually what's happening. But internally, especially if you've grown up in church and you've been around, you know, Christian or religious circles long enough, you may feel that way. You may feel a bit of self condemnation if you aren't doing this perfectly.

So, like I said, I have found some freedom along the way, and that's been beautiful because if there's anything that I believe that Jesus wants for his people, it's freedom. We have found so, so many ways to put ourselves back into bondage by trying to be good Christians. But listen, you guys. God came to set us free and his freedom is complete and it is real and it is true liberation.

So when I see people struggling to try to keep up with some standard, I just, I think about the Book of Galatians a lot, which in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul literally says, Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you and then goes on to say like you're trying to rebuild the things that I tore down by the death, by my death on the cross.

Jesus, not Paul. Paul did not die on the cross, but that Jesus tore down by his death on the cross. You're trying to rebuild those things and basically putting yourself back into the bondage that Christ died to set us free from. And I think that can apply to so many things, including trying to be a perfectionistic.

Believer. So I have really enjoyed being able to release control of what a quiet time looks like and really learn what it's like to connect with God in the rhythm of my day in a way that is healthy, that doesn't actually steal my sleep. Okay. That might be a controversial statement cuz some of y'all are like, it doesn't matter.

Uh, you should wake up at 5:00 AM and have your time with God if that's what it takes. And trust me, I've been that person and there are seasons where that is beautiful. That is amazing. I'm not gonna lie. When I had a newborn and a toddler, I literally did that. I would get up at like five 15 in the morning.

Pump milk cuz I was breastfeeding, read my Bible and pray before my kids got up and I had to get them dressed and ready to go to daycare and all the things. That was a season where I had the grace for that. But I, that is not the season that I've been in for a while. That's not the season that I'm in right now.

I still get up early. But listen, so do my kids. My kids get up early too. And what I have found is that allowing myself to still have a quiet time, I have a little chair. It's actually not a little chair. It's a big round papasan chair in the corner of my tiny living room. And my daughter usually comes out with her messy hair and her warm cheeks at six 30 in the morning and comes and sits on my lap and we snuggle and then, I turn on right now, my thing is like ambient noise or like nature sounds on my headphones and I tell her that this is what I'm doing.

I'm reading my Bible Now. It doesn't mean she doesn't interrupt me, but I will listen to. What's going in my headphones, and I'll spend a few minutes just settling into my chair and maybe listening to what my heart is saying, what my body is saying, what God is saying to me. And I'll pray for a few minutes.

And then I'll open my Bible and I'll read or I'll work through the current Bible study that I'm working on. And my daughter especially, she has seen me do this day in and day out. And when my son's around, he sees me do it as well. And sometimes I get a little bit frustrated because she'll ask me like random things, you know, if she's doing a project or um, playing with something and she has a question about it, she'll, she'll ask me and I will, I will attune with her, but I'll remind her like, okay, honey, this is mommy's time.

I'm reading my Bible. And she's started to actually want to read it with me. So after I have my time to myself, which can vary just depending on what's going on in my house, because this is real life. It can vary from 15 minutes to 45 minutes. But after I have that time, I'll let her come sit on my lap and she'll read a psalm.

To me, it's like the cutest thing in the whole white world, and she's learning to like. Pick out a verse that really stands out to her. It's so cute and it's just fitting into the rhythm of our life. And I wanna encourage you, like you can show your children that having that time for you is important. It doesn't mean it's ever gonna be perfect, and we're all in different seasons.

I'm in a season now where my kids are old enough, where I can. You know, remind them gently to entertain themselves for 10 minutes at a time. Um, but. It's given me such freedom to know that there's no shame, there's no condemnation in the shorter quiet times. There's no reason to feel bad about myself because I keep getting interrupted with questions about how do you spell dragon mom?

Or things like that. And at the same time, I'm setting an example for my kids and I'm allowing myself to learn what it feels like to rest in the midst of. The life and the people that God has actually given me. It was hard. It was a process because as a young adult living alone and having as much time as I wanted to do these things, I really felt like that was the way that it should be done, because those times were precious to me.

But my life has changed and therefore my quiet times have changed and morphed, and that's okay. There will be a season again in the future when my kids are teenagers and they wanna sleep in, or when I'm an empty nester, and I'll be able to do that again. Or perhaps I'll have a season where I wake up really early and that feels good and okay and healthy for my body.

That's not the case right now, but that may be again in the future. And I just want you to know that wherever you're at, it's okay. You're not bad. You're not doing it wrong. There's no way to do this wrong. The intention is to connect with God, to get downloads from him, to acknowledge that you want to be in his presence.

Whether you're able to sit in your chair in the corner, or whether you're having to make school lunches or run someone to the dentist's office, he's with us every moment of every day. And our quiet time is really just the time where we get to meditate on the fact that he's with us. So I hope that's helpful for someone I know it's been helpful for me to learn these things along the way and to give myself a lot more grace and freedom, and it's just pure, pure joy really to be able to meet with the King of Kings.

It really is. And one more thing I'd like to add is like learning how to pray. Prayer has not ever been an easy thing for me, and I have found that for me, writing down my prayers is really my best way, especially with my ADHD brain, to really connect with my prayers and becoming more and more honest about what I'm really, I.

Thinking and what I'm really feeling to have someone that you can be completely honest with and share your heal emotions and thoughts is exactly what we get to encounter when we talk to God. So thank you friends for listening to this. I hope it's helpful for somebody out there, whether you're new to this term, quiet time, or whether you're a mama who's just been feeling bad about not getting the time that you think that you're supposed to have.

Just know you are doing great and you do not have to feel condemned or ashamed. The season will change eventually, and it will look different again, and that's okay. Thanks for having coffee with me today. I look forward to seeing you all here again next Tuesday for Paint of Passion Live. Love y'all.