Week Two-Prepare Your Heart

This idea of Preparing Your Heart as you enter Quiet Time was new to me. I never really did this before. I’ve always just opened my Bible and started reading. Sometimes you get bogged down in a part that doesn’t seem to make any sense or doesn’t seem relevant or my mind would just wander away as the mechanical part of my mind simply decodes all the words. Preparing My Heart really adds value to my Quiet Time as it helps me focus on God and changes this activity from simply “going through the motions” of so-called “being a Christian” to really making this time a meeting with God.

There is a song I hear quite frequently on the radio now which constantly reminds me of my goal in incorporating a Quiet Time in my life. The chorus goes as follows:

I don’t wanna go through the motions,
I don’t wanna go one more day,
Without your all-consuming
Passion inside of me.
I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking,
“What if I had given everything,
Instead of going through the motions?”

Catherine recommended journaling to us this week. I can see how writing things down will help solidify and clarify my thoughts. I’ll be able to go back over them at a later time to remember what I learned and felt in the past. It’s a place to write Bible verses that are meaningful to me and how God impressed them upon my heart.

I don’t like to slow down in my activities but I know it can only be beneficial. I am not simply a machine going through the motions of life. I need to stop. And consider things. And be able to remember them and return to them later or I will be “like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it - he will be blessed in what he does.” James 1: 23-25