Dan Alcantara

I’ve written before about how I try to wake up early in order to make time for Scripture reading and meditation. There is no getting around the fact that it has been very difficult to keep that up.

The Habitus is on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment and that’s largely due to the fact that I’ve also struggled to make time for writing and thinking about this stuff. These days have very much been days spent doing rather than thinking about the doing.

In some ways, that could be considered progress, particularly when it comes to building up a habit of prayer and Bible meditation. It’s so easy to get hung up on finding the system rather than just doing what works to make progress.

There’s a writer whom I enjoy on Youtube and she regularly tests out various writing routines. She’s done everything from Brandon Sanderson’s wake-up-at-noon-stay-up-all-night method to Neil Gaiman’s “Sit with your notebook and pen and you can do one of two things, write or not write but you can’t do anything else” routine. Then, a commenter asked what her own ideal routine would be. She had tried so many but nobody knew what her own routine was.

I worry that I might end up going the same direction when it comes to putting together a habitus, a deliberate, regular structure of prayer and meditation… for the purpose of godliness¹.

So I suppose the main reflection from all of this is that I am still continuing to work at things. I’m nearing the end of Job in my morning quiet time and I am looking forward to starting the Psalms in a couple of weeks. It will be a good excuse to make use of the Scripture Journal I have for the Psalms.

I also plan to continue studying Job because I find it absolutely fascinating. I’ve just finished Elihu’s speeches and I noticed the way he addresses many of the things that the Lord questions Job about in the coming chapters. I had never noticed that before and it was an exciting revelation the other day.

There is still much that I want to write about when it comes to spiritual disciplines and prayer in particular. As noted before, I recently finished reading Tim Keller’s book on prayer and found it immensely helpful. His tone was encouraging and his example methods or routines are doable, even including a simple structure for those who are just getting started with building a daily practice of prayer. As I mentioned in that post, I do highly recommend it to anyone wanting to get a picture of how Christian prayer is different to other kinds of prayer and how to grow in experience and fruitfulness in prayer.

I also came away from it with a list of other books that I’d really like to read.