stuck in a rut

Do you ever find yourself getting stuck in a rut? Where you have your devotions but it seems to have lost its ability to speak to you? That's where I have been for a while now. It has been a chore to read my Bible, or even to really spend anytime with God.

I'm one of those people where the look of how they spend time with God changes about as often the seasons. I just get bored with one way of doing things and need to do it a bit differently to keep my attention. This is where I was at recently. I had found a way of reading my Bible and hearing from God and I was using it. It was good, but I was getting bored with it so I was just sitting and doing it as fast as I could all the time . . . not exactly a great way to actually hear anything that God may want to say to you. I got stuck on this same way of doing my devotions, if you will, for a lot longer than I usually stick with any one method. It has a couple of years now of the same thing. It was the way that I found helpful when I was just getting my life back to normal after a battle with depression and I think becuase of that I was afraid to let go of this way. Doing things this way had spoken to me a lot during a time in my life where I needed that. But, for the last couple of months, it really hadn't been a good way for me to be doing things anymore - yet, I was still very hesitant to let it go. Needless, to say, when I finally got to the point where I knew that I had to change things, my time with God began to come alive again.

After that, and a couple of conversations I've had recently, I've started to think about we so often end up stuck in a rut in our spiritual lives. For whatever reason we get to a point where we're not learning and we're not hearing from God . . . and so we just go through the motions and keep doing things, even though they mean nothing to us. Most of the time in my experience and the experiences of others I have spoken to, God has to do something drastic in our lives to get us to wake up and get out of the rut we're in. (I'm just thankful that this time around it didn't take that for me.)

I've been wondering why we allow ourselves to stuck in these ruts. I mean, we know when we end up in one, so why don't we just get ourselves out of them? It seems so straightforward when we're not stuck in that rut . . . but it's not as clear when we are in the rut. It just seems strange to me.