Well.

   I got two comments on my post yesterday and one of them said that I was the second blogger she had read recently that had returned after a long break and it made her think, "Ok, I can do this too."  And so that made it all worth it to me.

   I don't know about you, but when it comes to the new year, usually for me it is this big fresh start, adrenaline boost, skip, hop and a leap into making progress on those goals and resolutions.  I'm not sure what is up with 2016, but this year has not held the usual productive fairy dust for me.

   Rather, I have found myself plodding along a little slower than ever before, sinking deeper and farther away from those bright prospective resolutions that are ever-shrinking tinier and tinier on my horizon.  One of which is my quiet time.

   Even the term "quiet time" elicits a derisive laugh from me.  Like when am I ever supposed to find any quiet time in my life?  And even if I were to track down some of this leprechaun/unicorn/quiet time that you speak of....how am I supposed to not SLEEP during it?!

   And so my Bible reading has reached perhaps an all-time low.  Not proud of it.  But I was SO challenged recently by thoughts from a Revive Our Hearts podcast, and I had to share.  You can listen to it over here. There are 3 parts, and I like to listen to them on my phone, because like I mentioned earlier....WHAT IS QUIET TIME.

   Jen Wilkin pointed out that so often, women don't get into the Word because we just don't "feel" close to God.  Been there, done that.  But an actual Pleasure Researcher (didn't know there was such a thing) discovered that pleasure develops.  It doesn't come by just repeating experiences over and over, but by learning all we can about them.  You don't love art because you just happened to view some images over and over and over.  You love it because you know its history, its story, its structure, its meaning, and anything else you can know about it.

  She goes on to say that women who lose interest in the Word have not been equipped to love it like they should.  Because the God of the Bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits.  And to know Him is to love Him.  So we can't "feel" our way to "feeling" differently.  We have to THINK our way there.  The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.

   That is why a THINKING faith is so important.  And we can get sidetracked by a Christian culture that makes us feel (there's that feel-word again) like we just need to FEEL caught up on a cloud of worship all of the time.  We need to crank the music and dim the lights and then maybe we will be able to feel close to Him.  But while all of those things are good and fine, they aren't the only way.

   Our Christian culture also places labels on women and men that just aren't true.  Men are the thinkers, and women are the feelers.  All caps would be insufficient to emphasize how this should not the case.  Women need a thinking faith too!  And the only way to get there is a 1st-hand knowledge of the Scriptures.  And when I say that I don't mean a devotional book.  Jen Wilkin totally called us out on that.  We're reading stacks of devotional books without cracking the covers of our Bibles, and God forbid that we become curators of opinions of other people's thoughts about a book that we never even bother to read.

  I am writing this post at a very vulnerable time because I feel like I have been completely failing in devoting time to the Word.  But that is the beauty of vulnerability. Because as long as I don't say anything about it, I am not going to be held accountable to anything, either.  But as soon as I launch something out there into the void, it ties a little string of accountability to me.  And I need that right now.

So now I'd love to hear from you.  How do you make getting in the Word a priority?