For the past 14 years devotions have been the hardest part of my walk with Christ.
It’s not because I don’t have frameworks (I have tried them all). Nor is it because I haven’t tried different times of the day, activities, or translations of the Bible (check, check, and check).
At first I struggled because I was convinced that God’s love for me ebbed and flowed based on the amount of time I spent with Him. An hour of devotions meant God would be pleased with me that day, and I might even get an extra-credit blessing. If it was reduced to 15 minutes (or even worse, nothing at all), I would have to bear the punishment of God’s displeasure, and I wouldn’t have the right to reach out to Him throughout the day.
Gratefully, the Holy Spirit convinced my stubborn mind that Jesus’ love for me is as constant as His character. I am not powerful enough to change His love by what I do or don’t do.
This Doesn’t Work
Then a new problem presented itself: how can I have the best devotional life possible?
See, I’m a classic firstborn—a type A perfectionist. To make matters worse, as a senior software engineer, my entire professional life revolves around finding optimal solutions, making processes more efficient, and solving problems faster. My brain is wired to look for patterns, to create systems, to optimize everything.
So naturally I approached my relationship with God the same way. There was even a brief period during which I thought I had figured it out.
I had a system: Bible reading as soon as I rise, prayer while driving to work, sermons while at the gym. I kept a pocket-sized prayer journal in which I’d write down answered prayers, just to prove to myself that I was doing it right.
I spent countless hours trying to find the perfect devotional equation. Is it 30 minutes of Bible study? 60? Should I focus on just one small passage, or read larger narratives? Should I pray before or after? For how long? Where does music fit in? Should I sing the music or just listen to it? Should I go for a walk in nature, or would that be too distracting?
If I could just figure out the ideal setup, I thought, I could replicate it every day without having to think about it. Like a spiritual algorithm that, once perfected, would run automatically.
But it didn’t work.
The more I tried to optimize my time with God, the more empty it felt. It was like trying to have a deep conversation while constantly checking the time—technically present, but not really there. I was more fixated on my process than my God.
Yesterday morning I caught myself doing it again. I sat down to pray, Bible open on my lap, but my mind was already racing ahead to all the tasks waiting for me. I found myself unconsciously timing my prayer, as if God and I were in a business meeting with a hard stop at 7:30 a.m. I didn’t have time to be there. I only had time to pretend to be.
Ellen White captures this tendency with devastating accuracy: “Many, even in their seasons of devotion, fail of receiving the blessing of real communion with God. They are in too great haste. With hurried steps they press through the circle of Christ’s loving presence, pausing perhaps a moment within the sacred precincts, but not waiting for counsel. They have no time to remain with the divine Teacher. With their burdens they return to their work.”1
That last line stops me every time I read it: “With their burdens they return to their work.”
Is that your recurring experience too? Bringing your anxieties, your fears, your decisions to Jesus, only to pick them right back up again in your hurry to move on to the next thing? Like me, maybe you have all of the right elements of a devotional experience. But our hurry and inattention make them meaningless.
Being unrushed with God is not about time management. It’s about trust.
A Relational God
Here’s what I’m learning: God doesn’t love me any less when I rush through our time together. His love isn’t dependent on how long I pray or how many chapters I read. The problem isn’t that God withdraws His love when I’m rushed—it’s that I become less aware of the love that’s always there.
It’s like sitting in a room with the curtains drawn. The sun doesn’t stop shining just because we can’t see it. But our experience of its warmth and light depends entirely on whether we take the time to open those curtains.
This is perhaps the hardest lesson for someone like me to learn: God is not a place to be successful. He’s not a project to optimize. He’s not a habit to improve. He’s a person to have a relationship with.
According to Ellen White: “An intensity such as never before was seen is taking possession of the world. In amusement, in moneymaking, in the contest for power, in the very struggle for existence, there is a terrible force that engrosses body and mind and soul.”2
I feel that force every day. You probably do too. Whether you’re a student in Manila trying to balance studies and faith, a mother in Mexico City juggling children and prayer time, or a businessman in Nairobi attempting to maintain spiritual priorities—that “terrible force” pulls at us all.
In our digital age we’ve become accustomed to instant replies, immediate solutions, and constant optimization. We treat our spiritual lives like apps that need updating—always looking for the next feature, the next improvement, the next version. But relationships don’t work that way. They never have.
The cost isn’t always obvious at first. But over time, rushing through our communion with God leaves traces:
A subtle hardening of the heart.
A growing difficulty in hearing His voice.
A weariness that sleep doesn’t seem to fix.
God’s strength doesn’t diminish when we rush past Him. His wisdom doesn’t fade. His peace doesn’t weaken. But our access to these gifts, our awareness of their presence and our ability to receive them, becomes dramatically limited by our hurry.
And yet God is never in a hurry.
Presence, Not Performance
The Creator of the universe, the One who holds all things together, who orchestrates the movements of galaxies and knows when a sparrow falls: He is never rushed.
When Jesus walked this earth, there is no record of Him running. He had only three and a half years to fulfill every prophecy, minister to the endless needs around Him, and train a dozen disciples to carry on His work. Yet He consistently took time to notice individuals, stop for conversations, and be interrupted.
This isn’t just a nice detail about Jesus’ personality. It’s a profound revelation about God’s nature. His unhurried presence is an invitation to us—not to earn His love through lengthy devotions, but to slow down enough to realize we already have it.
I won’t give you a five-step plan for having better devotions. I’ve tried enough of those to know they’re not the answer. The very idea of “better” devotions reveals how much we’re still thinking in terms of performance rather than presence.
Instead, there’s one truth that’s gradually changing my life: Being unrushed with God is not about time management. It’s about trust.
When I rush through my time with God, it’s because I don’t truly believe He can multiply my time. I don’t trust that being still before Him will actually make the rest of my day more manageable. My perfectionism whispers that if I’m not constantly moving, constantly producing, constantly optimizing, everything will fall apart.
The psalmist points us to a different way: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).
Notice that the stillness comes before the knowing. Not as a suggestion, but as a prerequisite. This is yet another reason Sabbath is both the hardest and most beautiful day of the week for me: we are commanded to rest and allow our Father to remind us that He is God and we never were.
This morning I tried something different. Instead of setting a timer for my devotional time, I simply sat with my Bible and told God, “I’m here for as long as I need to be.”
It felt incredibly uncomfortable. My mind kept darting to my to-do list, to upcoming deadlines, to all the reasons I couldn’t possibly sit here “doing nothing.” Everything in me wanted to turn this into another productivity exercise, to measure, optimize, and systematize this time with God.
But I stayed.
And in that unrushed space, something shifted. The words of Scripture began to sink deeper. My prayers became less like a recitation and more like a conversation. The silence between the words grew less painful.
I wasn’t suddenly more spiritual. God wasn’t suddenly more present. But in the stillness I became aware of what had been true all along: His constant love, His available strength, His unchanging presence.
I won’t pretend this one morning fixed my tendency to rush. It didn’t. But it reminded me of what’s possible when we choose to be unrushed in God’s presence.
When Less Requires More
Maybe you, like me, are tired of rushed devotions. You’re tired of carrying your burdens back to work, of pressing through the circle of Christ’s loving presence without really stopping to receive His counsel.
God is not asking us to carve out huge chunks of time every day. He’s not asking us to perfect our devotional routine or find the optimal spiritual algorithm. He’s asking us to be fully present in the time we have, trust Him enough to be still, and wait for Him even when everything in us wants to rush ahead.
He’s inviting us to know Him, not just know about Him. And knowing takes time: unrushed, unhurried, unoptimized time.
The world will keep spinning at its frantic pace. But we have a choice about whether to spin with it.
God is not impressed by our success. He’s moved by our dependency. All my attempts to optimize my time with God were really just attempts to maintain control, to keep my independence intact. But true communion happens in the vulnerable spaces where we finally admit we can’t optimize our way to intimacy with God.
There’s an irony here that I’m only beginning to understand: the more I try to rush through my time with God to get to real work, the less effective I actually become. I’ve noticed that on days that I truly slow down with God, my mind is clearer, my decisions are wiser, and my work flows more naturally. Not because I’ve earned some special blessing, but because I’ve finally positioned myself to receive what He’s been offering all along.
The math doesn’t make sense on paper. How can spending extra time being still actually result in a more productive day? But that’s exactly the point—God’s economy works in ways that confound our human calculations. He multiplies what we surrender, especially our time.
Perhaps that’s the real invitation in all of this: to lay down our illusion of control, to stop trying to earn what’s already freely given. The very act of slowing down is an admission that we’re not actually holding everything together—He is. Our rushed devotions reveal more about our trust issues than our time management skills. And maybe that’s exactly where He wants to meet us, in that uncomfortable space between our drive to achieve and His call to abide.
God is speaking in the midst of this maddening rush. He’s inviting us to come apart and commune with Him. Not to earn His love—we already have that. Not to access His strength—it’s already available. But to become aware of these realities in a way that transforms how we live.
He’s not in a hurry. He never has been. He’s just waiting for you and me.
1 Ellen G. White, Education (Mountain View, Calif: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1903), p. 260.
2 Ibid.
