Charlotte cries.

   I pick her up and continue to type with one hand because, for just a moment, my mothering instincts and my desire to write have locked horns.  Silence.  She is pacified, content with half of her mother's attentions. 

   The baby monitor squawks at me, informing me that Jocelyn is up from her 1 1/2 hour nap.  Never seems quite long enough.  I have written 7 sentences, if you count the fragments.  I had to think for a little there on how to spell "squawk".

   Charlotte stirs, Jocelyn cries again, and I put my writing aside.  I get Jocelyn out of her crib and return downstairs.  Pour myself some afternoon coffee.

  I need to find a different way to write.  A holographic keyboard perhaps?  That beams up onto the wall whenever and wherever you find yourself with a spare moment?  In the shower through the steam, on the ceiling right before falling asleep, across the windshield as you drive?  O.k. so that last one might be a little dangerous. 

   But writing isn't the only thing I need to figure out a different way to do...my quiet time has been suffering for a long time now, and it seems it is one of the first things to get sacrificed in my never ending list of to-dos.  How un-prioritized our priorities can become.  

   It's not that I don't "have the time".  That excuse always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because we all know good and well that we have the time.  We have it, we just don't use it right.   How else can one explain that I have "had the time" to read 324 pages (a little over half-way through) of The Poisonwood Bible, a novel about a missionary family set in the Congo, told from the viewpoints of the wife and four daughters and is so completely riveting that it seems to read itself, without any effort required on my part?  Couldn't I just as easily be reading the Bible?  Of course.  But we just don't find use the time. 

   Perhaps the main reason for this, is the fact that I really prefer my quiet times to be uninterrupted, alone, private, focused, and well....quiet.  And I'm quickly beginning to realize that requiring those circumstances has all but put a death sentence on my devotions. Because let's be honest, with small children you could count the times that all those stars align on one hand, and whenever they do, you're sleeping!  So I think I'm going to have to lower my expectations a little. 

   Sometimes I feel like I am the infant being pacified, content with a piece of rubber when I could be drinking deep from the milk the Word has to offer.  And even when I DO remember to drink the milk, aren't I supposed to be eating meat by now?  But it can feel so hard to get there, when I'm just barely ingesting a verse here and there or a list of whom-begat-whos in Chronicles because I'm trying to keep my head above water in my "read-the-Bible-in-a-year" plan. 

   But then I stumble across Psalm 50:14-15 and it seems to make everything a little clearer...