What If God Wasn’t A Chore?

I have God on my to-do list.

I put Him there primarily because I do not trust myself.  In the daily blitz, I often cultivate the best of intentions—but a small task here and a series of processes there can mean that, long after getting into bed, I can look up at the ceiling and realize I did not engage with God at all.

I long to be a holier person than this.  I’m not.

Therefore, God or time with God or Scripture or pray sits in my to-do list alongside check peanut butter and refill toothpaste and call K.

This works.  Mostly.  I am a task-oriented person and a great lover of lists and it serves as the reminder it needs to be.  Most days, I remember God.  But not in the way I’d always prefer to remember God.

Here is my secret: I keep two to-do lists.

One is the work and “life list.”  It is on this list that God resides.  This is the most important list; this is the fundamental-to-existence list; this is the things-will-go-badly-if-I-forget-this list.  It is full of imperatives and the tasks that make life go.

My other to-do list is what I call “the fun creative one.’

I started it when my mom was ill: a small way to give myself bright spots in unbearably dark days.  I’d write down a crochet pattern I wanted to try, or a craft, or a fun experience: watching Lord of the Rings, or writing, or trying my hand at something new.

Nothing on the list is a necessity in the slightest.  But it is full of life-giving, joy-giving things, little things I look forward to, inspirational bursts for dry and deadening times.  And I wondered, as I looked at it, why God didn’t live on this list.

Why do I—why do we—approach spiritual life as a chore?

Well, because sometimes the exercises that mean the most for us—brushing teeth, showering, doing our daily work, cleaning up the kitchen—are necessary whether or not we find them fun.  We oughtn’t abandon our pursuit of holiness at the first sign of boredom.  And it’s dangerous to prioritize feelings as the divine guide of all action.  If I waited for inspiration to strike to start a task, I’d never get anything done.

But if we aren’t careful, tending to our relationship with God and our spiritual growth daily can quick become an act of rote virtue, an obligation to complete, rather than an opportunity to engage with the love that made the world and guides the stars. We can make God small by keeping him on our task lists, limit the depths we might visit with Him.

I sat down, considering this, and I asked myself: what do I know I need daily with God?  What are the fundamentals?

For me, there are three: speaking to Him (prayer), hearing from Him (listening and reading Scripture), expressing gratitude/praise.

Mostly, this looks very rote during the day to day: read passages of Scripture or passages with a devotional reading, pray sitting at my desk, listen quietly on a walk.

This, I realized, was what made it feel like a task: the way I carried it out.  It wasn’t inspiring or fun or malleable.  It didn’t function like a relationship.  I don’t make an appointment with my husband every day at 5pm and carry out the same series of interactions over and over.

So I experimented with ways of bringing those components into each day…using my fun to-do list.  This has looked like a lot of different things, including but not limited to:

• praying through a chunk of the Lord of the Rings about something God made me notice during the movie
• praying for people while spice-bread-baking (and it was a lot of people, because it involved grating a lot of apples and carrots)
• crocheting my way through a praise session
• editing photography with God and thanking Him for the things and people in the images
• engaging in something creative after reading God’s word as a way of thinking through the Scripture

I’m still spending time with God every day.  I’m still doing the same things I want to do regarding my spiritual life every day: the work of growth and faithfulness and obedience.  I’m still living out what I hear and pray about.  But it’s no longer a chore.

In fact, it’s opened up a lovely, vibrant world for me.  What way will I try to grow close to God today? is so much richer than Guess it’s time to sit and pray and read.  Moreover, it integrates God into all the different spaces of my life. 

To show up daily matters.  To show up regardless of how I feel matters.  And this doesn’t mean my days of desk-praying are over.  Sometimes, that might be how I choose to meet God.  But the possibilities are broader than I let myself imagine. And when I stopped treating my spiritual life as either an act of discipline or a wild and spontaneous act—when I blended the two in a way that brought God into the places of joy and brightness in my life—my closeness with God changed too.

If you’re in a rut, don’t abandon your commitment—just change the rut.  We have so much freedom in Christ to enjoy our time with God!