Busy Mom’s Tools For Spiritual Growth

As time goes by, life just gets busier and busier doesn’t it?

I’m very guilty of putting important things, like my spiritual growth, on the back burner to make more time for dealing with things that seem to need my attention right now. I keep thinking that life will slow down, and that eventually, I’ll have more time.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Finally, I became convicted that I’ve got to stay in the Word no matter what else comes up in life, and thanks to modern technology, it’s actually very easy to do.

Now, just let me say this upfront. I know a lot of moms swear by getting up early to get their “quiet time with God” in, but I just can’t do that at this stage in my life. For me, with a baby who still doesn’t sleep through the night, I need more total time in bed. So when I wake up, it’s get dressed and immediately out the door to milk goats, then back in to make breakfast for Garrett, and so goes the day. 

So my study and prayer time doesn’t usually happen all at once, but rather, in bits throughout the day. It usually starts while I’m nursing Haddassah, and If I’m lucky, I’ll get through my whole daily reading in one stretch. Other times, I may get interrupted three verses in. I just try to roll with it.  

But just like you can make time for fitness if it’s really important to you, there are multiple ways for us busy moms to fit in Bible study time. Here are the three main tools I use:

• http://www.biblestudytools.com I LOVE this website! I first found it while searching for commentaries online. Then I noticed they had this nifty little feature called Reading plans. There are several to choose from, depending on your goals, and currently, mine is to read through the entire bible by the end of the year.

What I love about it is that the daily passages are email directly to my inbox, so I can read them on my iPod whenever I get the chance. It’s so much easier to handle a baby, and a small e-reader than it is to flip pages in an actual book.

• Audio Bible – I can’t tell you how much I love having an Audio Bible. Sadly, we’re missing most of the New Testament, but the parts we do have get their fair share of listening. It has allowed me to become familiar with parts of the Old Testament that were largely ignored in my previous bible learning. It’s much less tedious to listen to the book of Genesis multiple times, than it is to read through it. And it takes surprisingly little time.

We have and love The Word of Promise, which is dramatized by some fairly well known actors (I suppose that’s part of what makes it so easy to listen to). Like I said, I love it, however, when I looked it up to see if I could order the parts we’re missing, I was disappointed to see how expensive it is. I don’t know why I was surprised – it is over 90 hours worth of audio. I think I’ll be keeping an eye out on eBay.

• Sermon Audio – Yep, more audio, the Best way to multitask – engage your ears with one thing, and your hands with another. According to the homepage, there are 772,224 sermons available. That’s a lot of listening! You can search for sermons by topic, or speaker. Obviously, reading the bible ourselves is very important, but listening to others expound the word of God is also an excellent means to furthering our understanding of God’s word. Sermon Audio is one of the big reasons I wish we had faster internet available out here. 
• Music – Music can really go far in setting the mood in your home. Your little ones will pick up and that mood, as well as the lyrics.  Listening to good, theologically sound music is a great way to keep God’s word in the forefront of your mind. Some of our favorites include Selah, Steve Green (oldies, but goodies people), Michael Card’s lullabies, and Nathan Clark George (excellent scripture music there). I’m trying to expand our music library little by little. 

With all of these things available, we don’t need to ever lack for spiritual food. If you can make a habit of reading the Bible before checking Facebook, and putting on a sermon or scriptural music before the easy listening stuff – and you can – you’ll be amazed by how you , even as a busy mom of little people, can immerse yourself in the Word.

These are my favorites. What are yours?