How I Have My Daily Devotions

I’m a faithful listener to Russell Moore’s Signposts podcast, and I enjoyed the one he did last spring about how he has his daily devotions. 

Discussions like these are a lot like parenting discussions: hearing how someone else did it isn’t necessarily going to dictate exactly how YOU should do it, but it’s always helpful to get ideas from someone else in the trenches.

And in that spirit, I offer this post: here’s how I have my daily devotions.

Part One: Prayer

I’ll admit my bias from the beginning: I think I have an advantage here as an Anglican. The Book of Common Prayer is just such a rich resource when it comes to devotional instruction. It’s actually what first drew me to the Anglican church: when I first read the words of the General Confession, I thought, Here are the words I’ve been trying to say to God for my whole life.

I knew I’d found my home then.

And so, in my daily devotions, I use the structure of the BCP. When I have a lot of time, I’ll read the entire Morning Prayer service. But, happily for those of us who aren’t cloistered religious, there are shorter services in the BCP, too. I usually use the one-page “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families.” This leads me through an opening few prayers, gives me the space to sing a hymn, gives me a place to ask my own individual requests, and closes with the Lord’s Prayer and a collect.

Moving parts: 

-I work my way through the hymnal, singing one a day, and only using the ones whose melodies I can work out with my very poor skills on the recorder. :)  I just work my way from front to back of the hymnal during Ordinary Time, and then I switch to seasonal hymns (Advent, Christmas, Lent) when appropriate.

-I say the collect of the week right after the closing collect. This is a nice link to our Sunday services, since I hear the weekly collect first at Sunday worship.

-Personal petitions: I keep track of who I want to pray for using a simple notebook. I pray for my immediate family and my parents and siblings (and their spouses and children) every day. I also pray for my extended family on Mondays, my husband’s extended family on Tuesdays, our church and church stuff on Wednesdays, ministries and missionaries on Thursdays, and specific requests from friends and family on Fridays.


I used to be overwhelmed by the number of things I meant to remember to talk to God about, and the idea of getting to them all at once was so daunting that I didn’t even start. I still have this forlorn idea that it might be perfect if I COULD remember everyone before the Lord every day of the week, but I’ve learned that it’s better to start somewhere than to let myself get so intimidated by the perfect that I lose the good. And so I divide things up.

This isn’t a strict rule, by the way: when I feel moved to pray for someone on Tuesday’s list, I don’t say, “Oh no, it’s Monday, I can’t do that yet!”  The list just gives a normal structure for normal days.

Part Two: Bible-reading

So here’s where I’m sort of untraditional: I listen to the Bible much, MUCH more than I actually read it. And I need to be honest: I’m not sure this is the IDEAL way to get the scripture into my heart and mind.

BUT, it is the way that has SUCCESSFULLY gotten the scripture into my heart and mind and so, again, it’s better than the Not Doing It At All Because I Cannot Do It Perfectly.

So here’s how I do it. I use two tools: the St. James Daily Devotional and Alexander Scourby’s complete reading of the King James Bible. (Note: I’m not a KJV-only reader. I just really like Scourby’s reading voice. He does a great job of reading the words like they actually MEAN something.)

Every weekend, I take the St. James devotional, and I make myself a playlist in iTunes of the week's readings. (I also read Fr. Reardon's commentary on the readings, because it inevitably gives helpful and illuminating context.) The devotional takes you through the OT once every two years, the NT every year, and the Psalms every month. I put the chapters for the week on a playlist, and I add in the Proverbs for the week. (As Proverbs has 31 chapters, it’s pretty easy to read it through every month, just matching the chapter number to the date.)

This playlist is usually about 2 hours long. I spend some time on the weekend listening to the OT chapters and Psalms, and deleting almost all of them as I go. If a chapter or Psalm really stands out, I’ll leave it on, and eventually I have a half hour playlist of mostly gospels and epistles (and a Proverb a day) that I can commit to listening to each weekday morning.

Then, on each weekday morning, after I’ve prayed, I spend a half hour knitting and listening to the Bible. I do this because I find that having something rhythmic for my hands to do leaves my mind free to concentrate on the words I’m hearing. It can't be anything complicated--no counting!--or else it becomes a distraction rather than a help.

I find that listening instead of reading slows me down enough to really pay attention to what’s going on in the lesson (I’m a fast reader, and skimming is a bad habit when it comes to scripture). Sometimes, I’ll stop the playback and look up something on Bible Gateway, so that I can slow down even more, and really see what the author of the book is getting at.


I can’t tell you how much this has changed my life: I’ve become a different person in the last six years or so that I’ve been doing this. Having the scripture running through my head this way…you can’t spend that much time in God’s word and NOT have it change you, I don’t think.

I have pieces of the Psalms floating though my head every day now. It’s so good.

Never, never, never give up

If there were one thing I could encourage every Christian to do, it would be to spend more time in the Word. And I know that’s probably something you hear everywhere, and maybe it’s something that makes you feel guilty, and all I can say is: keep trying. Don’t give up. Beg God for help. Ask Him to help you find whatever method is going to work for you. Try it a million different ways until you find one that sticks, and don’t forget to pray the whole way through, because you have an Enemy who will fight you every step of the way.

It took me to my thirties to make this a regular habit, and I have been a Christian since I was two. (Really. I remember.)

And admitting that it took so long makes me feel so silly. It shouldn't take a grown-up Christian decades to figure out a regular devotional habit, right? But I offer it in case it encourages someone else to keep going. PLEASE, keep going. And when you fall down, get up, and keep going again. We all stumble in many ways…

But He who is with you is greater. Ask Him for help here, and He will give it to you. He gave you this great deposit of faith already; He WANTS you to listen to Him. He wants His law to form your heart and your mind.



I’m hoping to follow this post up next week with a post about how we have devotions with our kids, because it’s really something that’s grown out of our (my husband’s and my) personal devotional practices.

Meanwhile: read the Bible any way you can. Pray for yourself and those you love. Keep going. Don’t give up. I can’t tell you how often it feels like I’m struggling through the La Brea tar pits in order to get to my prayer time, as if there were gooey stiff black ooze sucking at every movement of my legs. It can really suck sometimes, trying to fight towards that oasis of light and refreshment. And there are even times when I finish and think, “That was completely rote. I don’t feel anything but stupid and frustrated and dry. I don’t feel like I was even talking to myself, let alone to GOD.”

That’s okay. It’s like that sometimes. Keep going. Just like it matters that you kiss your children goodnight, even when you’re tired and sore and grumpy, because you LOVE them, and OF COURSE you’re going to show them so, no matter how you’re feeling; it matters that you spend time with your Lord, talking to Him and listening to His word.  You are not bad or unfaithful or rotten for having it be hard. You are a normal Christian, living in a fallen, whiny world.

It’s okay. Keep going.

Remember that, as a mother loves the least little wonderful efforts her children make towards goodness, so your Heavenly Father loves your stumbling steps towards Him.

He is good. Spending time in His presence is worth it. Keep going. Because He is good.


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


The links to the Scourby recording and the BCP are Amazon affiliate links, because why not? Read full disclosure about Amazon affiliate links on the sidebar of this blog.  Other links are just normal links.

A great resource for reading the daily offices

I was recently sent a link to a great resource for reading the daily office: the Trinity Mission, offers an audio (and text) reading of the daily office.  So you can go to their site and listen and read and pray along to Morning Prayer, Mid-day Prayer, and Evening Prayer.  This includes the daily scripture readings.

Like I said: a very helpful resources! Hope it's a help to you.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

How Morning Prayer Primes the Pump

Sometimes my morning prayer time is rich. But at other times it feels like I'm just going through the motions.

This is a post in praise of just going through the motions.

Why? Well, for the usual reasons: faithfulness, building good habits, doing-the-right-thing-even-though-you-don't-feel-like-it, and, oh yes of course, obedience. Because it doesn't become a false or bad act just because you can't get your heart in sync with your head every time.

But here's my new reason: because even fitful, floppy, funky morning prayer primes the pump.

If I pray faithfully through the office in the morning, going down my prayer list for that day and holding myself, my family, and my friends before the Lord . . . then it's easier to pray the whole rest of the day through.

When I've once lifted up my children to the Lord in the morning, even if it was hard and I didn't really want to sit there and talk to Him about them, I find that the rest of the day? Prayers and petitions on their behalf come easily to my lips.

The pump is primed.

And often those later-in-the-day prayers are so much more heartfelt, more fruitful, more insightful than the grudging morning office I offered.

But I don't think I would have gotten to the more easy, natural, sweet conversation with the Lord unless I'd stuck to it early in the day when I was tired and grumpy.


Honestly, it's just like a human relationship, isn't it?


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

writing and the morning.

The day stretches before me, and I'm curious about what it holds. It's my first breathing space of the day; after the rush of breakfast and diapers and nursing, and cleaning up from breakfast and reading some books and nursing again, the babies are down for their naps and the kids are down for their quiet times. Or, rather, up, since I'm the one sitting in the living room at the bottom of the stairs.

I'm always puzzled at what to do with this short half hour or forty-five minutes of peace. Do I pray? do I relax? do I try to get some chores done? do I write?

Often I do some combination of the four. I'll start by puttering around a bit with the house stuff: move this over there, put that away, start this part of dinner so the end of the day is less harried. Today it was getting all the dirty clothes into the laundry bags and fishing out a recipe for herbed bread that I want to make to go with tonight's creamy veggie soup. Then a bit of relaxation: reading a snatch of TWOP's recap of Survivor (the one TV show we actually watch on the TV - over at my mother-in-law's; what can I say? it's become a Grandma-time tradition: dinner and Survivor). And now the tea is on, and I might read through the morning daily devotion in the BCP and then try to get a bit more of my novel rewritten.

The novel now, that's a thing. I wrote it in the small space between when my son started sleeping through the night and when I got pregnant with Lucy and Anna. Now that Lucy and Anna are - not sleeping through the night - but only waking up once to nurse - I'm starting to rewrite it. I didn't expect to be doing it so soon, but my husband, who hadn't read it yet, started reading it aloud to me during our dishes-and-clean-up time that we have every night after the squirts are a in bed, and hearing the words rather than seeing them has given me a gift I never expected to have: the gift of being able to experience my own words as a reader, and not a writer. I'm terribly afraid Adam has just let himself in for an entire lifetime of reading my work back to me. Brave man.

So I am working on the little, obvious fixes that I've noted. Add dialogue here. Make that character more consistant throughout. Show, don't tell, that they had a lot of fun at the dinner party. And in the midst of these little changes, I'm hoping that the bigger one makes itself clear. The story starts with a flourish, and ends with a delightful build-up of tension and an even more delightful release, but there is something missing from the beginning-middle of the book, and though I can feel the shape of what ought to be there, I don't know the specifics yet.

The shape of the change is so clear in my mind; when I talk about it, I always make the same low, round motion with my hands. But I don't know exactly how it is to be done yet. So I'm hoping that by fixing the easy things - this paragraph, that scene - I'll be able to lure the big change out of hiding. It's there, I know it, I can feel it, and I hope that by innocently working in its vicinity, while paying it no direct mind, it will come out of hiding, and show me its face.

But for now? Tea and Psalms. I've read all the way through them again, my one consistant piece of Scripture reading this year, and I'm back at the beginning: "Blessed is the man . . ."

That, and perhaps the biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that I got out of the library. Today is her saint day, and I know nothing about her except that one of the other liturgical blogging moms around her had her daughter dress up as St. E of H for Halloween. It made me curious, and so now I have an old, yellow hardback from the library that's going to assuage my curiosity. I should have read it last week, but I was deep in the middle of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That's done as of this morning though, and so to St. E of H I go!

I hope your morning goes well, and that the best possibiities of the day become reality.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

still Easter

And that means I'm still reading things like this everyday in Morning Prayer:

"Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more. Death hath no more dominion over him."

Today I had to go in for a scary doctor's appointment, that ended up being not-so-scary, and actually rather good (i.e., neutral, which is pretty much always good in the medical world) news. Reading the verse above made me tear up.

Whatever happens, in these bodies of death, Christ has been raised from the dead, and dies no more. And he will show us the way through death, to himself.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica

Morning Prayer in the BCP

As I was reading the service yesterday morning, it struck me that Morning Prayer is a good balance to the spontaneous prayers I pray the rest of the day. Many of my prayers during the day are petitions. After all, it's the difficulties of daily life that remind you to look to the Lord, by and large.


But Morning Prayer is different. There are plenty of petitions in it, to be sure ("but thou, oh Lord, have mercy upon us; spare thou those who confess their faults"), and even a place where "Authorized intercessions and thanksgivings may follow," but there is much more praise. There are the canticles, which glorify the Lord. There are many repetitions of the Gloria Patri ("Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.") And there is great care throughout the whole service to address God as his greatness deserves: "Almighty God our heavenly Father", "Almighty and most merciful Father", "Christ the Lord", "God my Savior", "the Lord God of Israel", "Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father", "Lord God of Sabaoth", "the King of glory", "God, the King eternal", "almighty and everlasting God" and "Father of all mercies". These are all the titles which deserve to be constantly used, but that, in my hurry and distraction through the rest of the day, I forget and omit.

It's good to take time every day to use them. To pray to the Lord with the care and attention He merits. It's true that He hears my prayers that are uttered quickly and distractedly as I go about my day. But my prayer life would, I think, be unbalanced without this reverent, set-aside time in the morning. It gives Him His due, but it also has the salutary effect of reminding me who I address so easily during the rest of the hours I'm awake.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Morning Prayer Again

I've been reading the Morning Prayer service regularly now for several weeks. As I keep up this habit, I'm finding more and more things to like about it.

I like that it's made getting ready to take communion easier. Before mass, you're supposed to examine yourself, and confess any sins you've committed since the last time you went to mass. I don't know about you, but for me, this often consists of running through the past week quickly in my head, and then apologizing to my husband in the car on the way to church. Not exactly ideal.

But since I've been reading Morning Prayer every day, it's felt like I'm keeping shorter accounts. One of the first prayers in the service is the Confession, preceded by a moment of silence to think of what you're confessing. Doing this every day leaves me feeling much more prepared to take communion, because Sunday morning on the way to church is not the first time in the week I've consciously repented of my sins!

(I also have to note that confessing my sins every day prompts me to sin less, either because daily confession reminds me of what my perpetual temptations are, or because the thought of confessing later what I'm about to do now is so distasteful that I avoid the sin in order to avoid the confession. :D Either way, it's a good deterrant, and I'm grateful.)


I also like that morning prayer provides a set time and place to pray for my friends and family, especially the ones who are undergoing some particular trial or suffering some particular sorrow, or who are taking a stab at some particularly hard duty. You always say you'll pray for people, but it's easy to forget, and I find that Morning Prayer gives me one more place in my day to remember to make the petitions I promised to make. (The set place in MP to make those petitions, btw, is towards the end, just before the General Thanksgiving, where it says "Authorized intercessions and thanksgivings may follow.")


There's a lot more I like about Morning Prayer, but those three things alone: coming to communion more prepared, being prompted to sin less, and being prompted to pray for my loved ones, make saying Morning Prayer worthwhile for me.

And, maybe most importantly, I like starting my day by praising God. Saying, "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever" feels like the right way for a Christian to begin her work each day. It's starting the day with worship, with giving God his due. It just feels right. I'm sorry I've come to this habit so late, but I'm very grateful to have it now. It feels like a present from God. A "here, do this; it will serve me and help you." A very fatherly sort of a gift.

Which is to say, all this good stuff is not any virtue of mine. I think things like Morning Prayer, and all good traditions and words handed down to us by Christians who've gone before, are just more evidence of God's grace and love to us. I'm just glad that these resources exist to help us as we follow the Lord. He knows we need habits and help in order to be virtuous. I'm terribly afraid this post will sound snobby ("ooo, I read Morning Prayer"), but it's not meant that way. I just want to share something cool I've found. Please forgive me if it doesn't come across well! This post is meant as a thanksgiving. So . . .

Thanks be to God!


peace of Christ to you,
Jessica

p.s. the picture is of an olive tree in my front yard. In honor of all the tree references in the Psalms, the Psalms being an integral part of Morning Prayer.

p.p.s. For those of you fellow moms reading, who wonder where in my day I have time for Morning Prayer: I read it while my daughter is in her room having her quiet time, and my son is nursing down for his first nap. (Bess' quiet time comes whenever Gamgee is ready to sleep. It's a moveable feast.)