Soul Food Part 3: Your Time Alone With God

None of us have arrived.

That is kind of the whole point of sanctification — it is a lifelong process of being conformed to the image of Christ, and none of us are done yet. I think sometimes Christian content can feel like it is written by people who have already figured out the thing they are writing about, and I want this series to be different. We are all on the same journey. Just at different points on the road.

So I want to be honest with you about where I actually am on this one — not to be self-deprecating, but because I think there is more value in walking through something together than in me handing you a blueprint I built from a place I have not actually reached yet.

What I do know is what it costs me when I neglect it. And I love it too much to keep letting it slip.

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When I Actually Show Up

When I sit down with God — like really sit down, open the Word, actually pray, actually quiet the noise — it is genuinely one of the best parts of my day. There is this peace that comes in that I cannot manufacture any other way. A sense of His presence that is hard to describe but impossible to miss once you know what it feels like. It is not a hype thing or an emotion I have to work myself into. It is just real. Grounding. Like something settles that was restless before.

I love it. I genuinely love it.

And most days I give it maybe fifteen to thirty minutes while I give hours to everything else. That is the tension I am sitting in right now, and probably the tension a lot of you are sitting in too.

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The Honest Shape of My Days

My days have a rhythm. I wake up, get dressed, grab coffee, and get straight into work — my brain is sharpest in the morning and I protect that focus fiercely. I am not someone who is about to start a two hour morning routine. You know the ones — cold plunge, journaling, meditation, somehow reading three books and making a gourmet breakfast before the sun is even up. That is just not me and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I do read my Bible every day. I do pray every day — usually in the morning before I start work, or in the afternoon after I finish. I read a chapter, take notes, pull my takeaways, and pray through whatever is on my mind, and I am genuinely grateful for that consistency. But here is the thing I keep bumping into: doing all of that is not even close to the same thing as actually being with God. There is a real difference between moving through Scripture and sitting with the One who wrote it. I can read a chapter, fill a page of notes, and have my heart somewhere else the whole time. I can be productive about it and still not have really shown up at all.

That is the thing I am wrestling with. Not whether I am doing it — I am. Whether I am actually there when I do it.

And then outside of that block, life just fills in. Chores, work stuff, friendships, Maddy, the dogs, the thousand small things that being an adult requires of you every single day — none of it is bad, most of it is genuinely good, but a full life will crowd out even the best things if you are not intentional about protecting them, and I have not always been intentional enough.

“Cease striving and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10 (NASB 1995)

That phrase — cease striving — I feel that one. Because my default mode is that every hour needs to either be an input or an output. I am either consuming something that makes me better or producing something that moves me forward. Rest that does not have a future benefit attached to it feels wasteful to me. So just being with God — not studying, not producing, not optimizing, just sitting with Him — that is something I am genuinely still learning how to do.

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What Happens When I Do Not

Here is what I have noticed. When God quietly gets squeezed out — not in some dramatic way, just gradually as the days fill up around Him — the fruit starts to go. Not all at once, just slowly. The peace gets a little thinner, the patience runs a little shorter, and the love and joy that flow so naturally when I am close to Him start to feel like things I have to work for on my own — and I cannot sustain that. Nobody can. That is not how any of this works.

The fruit is not something you produce. It is something that grows when you are connected to the source. Jesus said it plainly — apart from Him we can do nothing. Not less. Not a little. Nothing. The peace, the patience, the love, the joy — those are not personality traits you develop or habits you build. They are the overflow of a life that is genuinely close to God. And when that closeness goes, they go with it, whether you notice right away or not.

It is never one bad day. It is more like a slow drift you do not catch until you look up and realize you have been running on your own steam for longer than you thought — and it shows.

The absence of God does not announce itself. It just slowly hollows everything out.

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What I Have Been Trying

One thing I have been genuinely working on lately is expanding what time with God looks like beyond just that one scheduled block in my day. Not adding more tasks to the list, but more like — changing the lens I look at my day through.

I am trying to just quietly recognize Him as the source of things as they happen. A good workout, good focus at work, a great conversation with a friend, a moment with Maddy that reminds me exactly why I asked her to marry me — instead of just experiencing those things and moving on, I am trying to hold them for a second and acknowledge where they actually come from. And when the hard things show up too — a frustrating day, something I cannot figure out — trying to remember that He is sovereign over those as well, and that nothing in my day is outside of His hand.

He is not a scheduled appointment. He is a constant reality.

I am just trying to start living more like that is actually true.

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Where I Am Landing

I do not have a tidy conclusion here because I am genuinely in the middle of it. But what I keep coming back to is this — it is not really just about getting more time with God, as good as that is. It is about living more for Him. About actually closing the gap between what I say I believe on a Sunday and how I spend my Tuesday, and becoming someone whose life looks different because of who God is and what He has asked of me, not just someone who fits Him into the margins when it is convenient.

The drift is never dramatic. It is just my life quietly bending back toward me instead of toward Him.

And I do not want that.

So I am figuring it out. And honestly I am really excited to deep dive into this in Part 3.5 — getting into what Scripture actually says about prayer and time in the Word, and what a real sustainable rhythm looks like. Everything I am learning I hope helps you just as much as it is helping me.

“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” — James 4:8 (NASB 1995)