How Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Changed My Quiet Time

For years my quiet time was a discipline I was proud of, and a little tired of. Every morning at six I would settle into the recliner by the living room window with my coffee, open the reading plan, and work through it the way I used to work through the church office inbox. I was faithful. I was consistent. And if I am being honest, I was mostly going through the motions.

I checked off the chapters. I underlined verses. I prayed through the list of names I keep in the back of my Bible. And somewhere along the way I realized I was doing all of it without actually changing. I could tell you what I read on Tuesday, but I could not tell you why I snapped at Glenn on Wednesday. The reading was not reaching the parts of me that needed reaching.

The book that finally spoke to that was Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero. A woman in our Tuesday morning Bible study brought it to me, dog-eared and underlined, and said, "Darlene, this one is about you." I laughed. Then I read the first chapter and stopped laughing. I stayed up later than I should have, which for me is the highest compliment I can pay a book.

Peter Scazzero is the founding pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens, and he writes about something most of us in church have been taught to ignore: the link between how we feel and how we pray. His argument is simple. If I bury my feelings during the day, I cannot set them aside when I sit down with my Bible. They come to the recliner with me. Every frustration I pushed down at the church office showed up in my prayers, usually disguised as something else.

That sounds obvious when I write it out. It was not obvious to me. I had spent decades treating emotional maturity and spiritual maturity as two separate projects, and treating the first one as optional. I thought a faithful woman was a steady woman, and I was very good at steady.

In my late fifties I started walking most mornings and paying attention to sleep and stress after a stretch of burnout. That helped my body. This book helped the part of me that the walking could not reach. It gave me language for things I had been carrying for years, and it did it without once telling me I was doing my faith wrong.

I could tell you what I read on Tuesday, but I could not tell you why I snapped at Glenn on Wednesday.

The book walks through seven ways to bring emotional health into your spiritual life. The one that got me first was the chapter on letting go of the idea that God wants me busy. I had built my identity on being needed at church. The book does not tell you to quit everything. It asks harder questions, like why you are doing it and what you are avoiding. I did not like those questions. I needed them.

I read it slowly, a chapter a week, the way I would have read it in a study. Some mornings I would finish a section and just sit in the recliner, because the questions were about me and not about a text. That is the thing about Peter Scazzero. He has a pastor's habit of telling the truth about himself, including the parts that are not flattering, and that gives you permission to be honest too. He is not writing from above you. He is writing from beside you.

One morning I sat with a feeling I had been carrying for months, a resentment about a church commitment I had said yes to for the wrong reasons. Instead of praying around it, I prayed about it. I told God the truth. That is a small sentence to write, and it was a hard thing to do. Nothing dramatic happened. I just felt lighter, and I understood for the first time what Peter Scazzero means when he says that emotional health and spiritual maturity are the same project.

By the time I finished, my quiet time looked different. I still read at six. I still drank the same coffee. But I started paying attention to what I was feeling before I opened the Bible, and I started telling the truth about it in my prayers. That small change has made more difference to my mornings than any reading plan I have ever stuck with.

I have recommended it to our Tuesday group, and several of the women have read it with their husbands or their adult daughters. It is not a light read. It asks for honesty, and honesty is harder than note-taking. But it is the kind of book you pass on, and I have passed on this one more than any other in the last few years.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table, I would tell you this. Do not read Emotionally Healthy Spirituality the way you read a devotional, a page a day and then on to the next thing. Read it slowly, with a pen, and give yourself room to be uncomfortable. If you have ever finished a quiet time feeling like you went through the motions, this book is worth your time.

I would also tell you that it is not a book about doing more. It is a book about being more honest, and that is harder. You may not like every chapter. I did not like all of mine. But I am a steadier person at sixty-one than I was at fifty-eight, and I give a good part of the credit to this book and to the woman who pressed it into my hands after Bible study.