The series at church for the next few weeks is about Margin in our lives. Margin in our finances, extra time with our families, even more importantly, extra time with God. So our pastor challenged us to find five minutes a day to be completely quiet before God. No TV, no music, no talking, just quiet. Do you know how hard that is to do? My only shot for that is at night, before I go to sleep, after the girls are down. Otherwise, it’s just not happening.

Why? Because I can’t even go to the bathroom alone without one or both of the girls coming in to see what I’m doing. And if I try to get clever and lock the door (because even Reagan has figured out how to open the doors around here), they stand on the other side of the door knocking, or stick their toes and fingers under the door asking if I can see them. On the bad days they stand on the other side of the door screaming as if I’m never coming out again!

It’s like they have radar. If they’ve actually been playing nicely together and I think I have a few minutes, they sense it and come to make sure my time is only for them. Not that these are bad things, just things that make it hard to be truly quiet. Our Pastor pointed out that if Satan can’t make us bad, he’ll do his best to make us busy. What a good point! The busier we are the more we tend to just fit God into our lives instead of making Him our first priority.

Last night I completely forgot about that 5 minutes, which means today I’m going to try for 10. Probably won’t happen, but I’m going to give it a shot.