What to Do When Quiet Time Feels Like a Chore

There is a stretch in every long practice where it stops feeling like anything. You open the Bible, you read the words, and nothing happens.

This is not usually a crisis of faith. Most of the time it is much less dramatic than that. Psalm 5:3 says that in the morning I will lay my requests before you, and will watch expectantly. Watching expectantly is the part that goes quiet in a flat season. The laying out still happens, it just stops feeling like it is heard.

Rule Out the Boring Causes First

Are you tired? Are you hungry? Have you been sitting down to read at the exact moment three other people need something from you?

A quiet time squeezed between the alarm and the school run will feel like a chore because it is one. Fix the logistics before you diagnose the soul.

Ask also whether anything else in your life has gone flat at the same time. If work, food and friendship all feel like nothing right now, the quiet time is a symptom rather than the problem, and it is worth telling someone.

Change One Variable

The urge is to overhaul everything. Resist it, because then you learn nothing about what was actually wrong.

Change the time, or the place, or the book. One at a time, for a week each. The chair by the window instead of the kitchen table is sometimes the whole answer.

Read Somewhere Different in the Bible

Nine mornings out of ten, flatness comes from reading the same kind of text for too long. Epistles are dense. Leviticus is slow going alone.

Go to Mark for narrative, or to the Psalms for feeling, or to Ruth for a story you can finish in one sitting. Movement helps.

Or read the same short book every day for a fortnight. Philippians takes twelve minutes and by day ten you start hearing sentences you had read past nine times already.

Shorten It on Purpose

Cut it to seven minutes for two weeks. Deliberately, not by neglect.

A short practice you finish leaves you wanting more. A long one you endure teaches you to dread the chair.

Say the Boredom Out Loud

Tell God it feels like nothing right now. This is a legitimate prayer and there are whole psalms made of it.

Naming it usually takes the shame out, and the shame is often what actually makes the practice unbearable.

Psalm 42 asks God why he is forgotten, and it is in the book. That should settle whether such a prayer is permitted.

Keep the Appointment Anyway

Feeling is not the measure. Plenty of what grows in a person grows in the stretches that felt like nothing at the time, and only shows up later.

So sit down tomorrow, shorten it, and change one thing. Flat seasons end, and they usually end quietly.

Give it six weeks before you conclude anything. Most flat stretches are shorter than that, and the ones that are not usually have a cause that has nothing to do with the chair you sit in.