TAKE BABY STEPS - Keys To Spending Time With God From Paul Miller

When it comes to spending time with God, take baby steps. Don’t set impossible goals and then collapse. If you can remember a time in your life when you had a great half hour of prayer, don’t make that your standard. Start slowly. Take a baby step of five minutes.

There is no one way to do this. Some people pray on their way to work. My one caution is that it is tough to be intimate when you are multitasking. It would weaken a marriage if talking to your spouse in the car was the only time you communicated. It will do the same to your relationship with God.

Here are seven simple suggestions for how you can spend time with your Father in the morning: 

• Get to bed. What you do in the evening will shape your morning. The Hebrew notion of a day as the evening and morning (see Genesis 1) helps you plan for prayer. If you want to pray in the morning, then plan your evening so you don’t stay up too late. The evening and themorning are connected. 
• Get up. Praying in bed is wonderful. In fact, the more you pray out of bed, the more you’ll pray in bed. But you’ll never develop a morning prayer time in bed. Some of my richest prayer times are at night. I’ll wake up praying. But those prayer times only began to emerge because I got out of bed to pray. 
• Get awake. Maybe you need to make a pot of coffee first or take a shower. 
• Get a quiet place. Maybe a room, a chair, or a place with a view. Or maybe you do better going for a walk. Make sure that no one can interrupt you. 
• Get comfortable. Don’t feel like you have to pray on your knees. For years I was hindered from praying because I found it so uncomfortable to pray on my knees. 
• Get going. Start with just five minutes. Start with a small goal that you can attain rather than something heroic. You’ll quickly find that the time will fly. 
• Keep going. Consistency is more important than length. If you pray five minutes every day, then the length of time will slowly grow. You’ll look up and discover that twenty minutes have gone by. You’ll enjoy being with God. Jesus is so concerned about hanging in there with prayer that he tells “his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1, NIV). 

Regardless of how or when you pray, if you give God the space, he will touch your soul. God knows you are exhausted, but at the same time he longs to be part of your life. A feast awaits.

Miller, Paul (2009-05-15). A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World (Kindle Locations 742-757). NavPress. Kindle Edition.