Less Is More
You know those people who always need to be doing something, who hate to sit down and relax because there’s always something that needs to be done and it’s pointless to relax before everything is finished?
Yeah, I’m one of those people.
I drive my husband nuts on weekends because I want to cross reference our receipts with Mint to make sure everything matches up. I want to make sure we’re up to date with our savings goals. I want to get all the important mail sorted and filed away. I want to give the dog a bath and cut his nails. I want to get the car’s oil changed and fill out that rebate form for the new wipers on the SUV. I want to clean out the fridge and figure out a way to use that spinach that’s about to go bad. And I want to do it now.
All of it. Right. Now.
I pride myself on efficiency. At the grocery store, I order my list so we can pick up things on our usual route—counterclockwise, starting in produce. At home, I order tasks how I think we can get the most done in the least amount of time. And when something throws off that efficiency, I get angry—irrationally angry. I very clearly idolize my time.
As such, it’s easy for me to fall into a pattern with my morning and evening devotionals. Way too many times, I’ve fallen into the trap of simply checking them off my daily list. (And I confess that my evening devotional is currently stuck in that trap.) In the morning, however, I’m trying something new.
Several years ago, I heard that every morning, you should read a psalm to connect with God and a proverb to connect with people. I’ve tried to make that my morning devotional many times, but failed until now, when I finally made myself a reading calendar. Every morning, I read a psalm and a proverb, and on the weekends, I also read Ecclesiastes. And this plan will last me the whole year.
As you can imagine, it’s a lot of repetition-
—which is hard, sometimes, for someone like me to look past when I can easily finish Proverbs in a month and Psalms in five months and Ecclesiastes in a week and a half. But taking the time to read, read, and read again—and read several times every morning—has given me a peace that I haven’t felt in a long time. Being still not only in my heart, but also in my page-turning, is giving me a new kind of fuel, an energy to sustain conversation with the Lord and maintain a mind of sound wisdom.
It’s also allowing me to take the time I need to let the Word really stick, which has been a goal of mine for a while. To meet that goal, it looks like less really is more.
And if that isn’t efficiency, I don’t know what is.
- Going Home - July 1, 2020
- Sufficient to Sustain - December 4, 2019
- Flying Solo - June 5, 2019
“To meet that goal, it looks like less really is more.” What a great discipline to absorb – that taking time to make it stick is more efficient than speeding through. Thanks for the reminder to slooooooow down!!
Great post, Natalie. Why do we (“I”) think the more scripture I read each day, the better Christian I’ll be? I love this idea of slowing down and reading the same scripture over and over. That’s the best way to absorb it.