Creating Quiet for God #2

Here is Gordon MacDonald in Ordering Your Private World on getting quiet with God:

Silence and solitude have not come easily to me at all. I once equated them with laziness, inaction, and unproductivity. The minute I was alone, my mind exploded with a list of things I should do: phone calls to make, papers I should be filing, books unread, sermons unprepared, and people I ought to see.

The slightest noise outside my study door was a massive intrusion to concentration. It seemed as if my hearing became supersensitive, and I could overhear conversations at the other end of our house….Because my study is near our laundry room, it never seemed to fail that the moment I got into spiritual activity the washing machine would decide the load inside was unbalanced, and its foghorn-like buzzer would go off, insisting that I…should come and readjust the wash.

But concentrating even when there was silence became desperately difficult. I learned that I had to warm up, to accept the fact that for about 15 minutes my mind would do everything it could to resist the solitude. So among the things I did was to start by reading or writing on the subject of my spiritual pursuits.

MacDonald goes on to explain how journaling has been incredibly helpful to him in many ways, one of which was to get over the “hump” and begin to focus.

So don't be discouraged if you're distracted as you try to get quiet with God. Just keep at it every day. Eventually your mind will become trained and will more easily set aside your extraneous and irrelevant thoughts. And, even more importantly, God will honor your attempts to seek Him out and put Him ahead of all your other pressing thoughts and responsibilities. I've mentioned Elisabeth Elliot’s thoughts on this subject before but they continue to help me so I'll mention them again. Elliot also frets about that “wasted” time when you can’t seem to pray or get your mind to stay focused on God. She says she has come to regard them as an offering to God, no matter how imperfect.

It is a good and necessary thing to set aside time for God in each day. The busier the day, the more indispensable is this quiet period for prayer, Bible reading, and silent listening. It often happens, however, that I find my mind so full of earthly matters that it seems I have gotten up early in vain and have wasted three-fourths of the time so dearly bought (I do love my sleep!). But I have come to believe that the act of will required to arrange time for God may be an offering to Him. As such He accepts it, and what would otherwise be "loss" to me I count as "gain" for Christ.

(From Elisabeth Elliot’s A Lamp for My Feet.)