On the Subject of Scheduling Personal Devotions

Psalm 121:1-2, "I will lift up my eyes to the hills -- From whence comes my help? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth."

By now you may have found that distractions are abundant. We have attempted to pick a place, time, and plan for our devotions with the Lord, yet we can get side-tracked so easily! Elisabeth Elliot has some thoughts on this subject, and they are included here:

Distractions to Prayer

No one who has tried to pray for more than a few seconds at a time would claim that he is never distracted. It is astonishing to note how insistently and immediately irrelevant matters come to mind, noises occur, things to be attended to are remembered, people interrupt, and even physical discomforts or pains bother us which we had not noticed until we tried to pray. These things are, of course, the work of the master saboteur of souls, who knows how to render our spiritual machinery useless, by the loosening of the tiniest screw or the loss of the smallest nut.

Distractions can be useful. They provide constant reminders of our human weakness. We recognize in them how earthbound we are, and then how completely we must depend on the help of the Holy Spirit to pray in and through us. We are shown, by a thousand trivialities, how trivial are our concerns. The very effort to focus, even for a minute, on higher things, is foiled, and we see that prayer--the prerequisite for doing anything for God--cannot be done without Him. We are not, however, left to fend for ourselves.

"The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God" (Romans 8:26-27).

Shall We Stop Trying?

No! It may be that the plan you have for devotions needs to be tweaked a bit. Perhaps you must choose a different time, or maybe you should find another location where distractions are less. It's perfectly okay if you tailor-make it to fit your life-style. Let's not allow discouragement to set in. Take heart! God loves you and is very pleased when you make the effort to be with Him.