Faith and Fizz
I have tried to have quiet time the way the devotionals suggest — candle lit, blanket arranged, a mug of something virtuous and herbal steaming beside a journal I intend to fill with insight. It lasts about four minutes before my five year old needs something located, the dog needs something not eaten, and my “sacred morning” becomes a hostage negotiation where I’m telling my seven year old that “Mom needs a minute!”
What actually works is a cold can, cracked open with that specific hiss that has become, in my house, a Pavlovian cue for my brain to switch out of survival mode and into something closer to listening. I am not proud of this. I have read enough Enneagram content to know that Fours are supposed to find our rituals in candlelight and vinyl records, not in carbonated corn syrup. And yet, here we are.
I’m typically a hot mug of coffee girlie. Even in the summer. But that’s for fiction. When I’m writing something real, and something close to my heart– I need something cold and sharp and satisfying. It’s my little reward for doing the big thing and writing about my feelings.
Here is my defense, offered with the full sincerity of a woman who takes both her theology and her soft drinks seriously: ritual doesn't require solemnity to be sacred. It requires attention. It requires intention.
The candle people and the Diet Coke people are doing the same thing in building a small, repeatable doorway into being still and talking to God. We've just picked different doors to Him. Mine happens to be aggressively caffeinated and mildly embarrassing to admit to my dentist.
(Side note: I am utterly a candle person, too. Lighting a candle puts me right into writer mode. So I really should have no excuses, right?)
There's a version of faith that only counts if it looks holy from the outside — hands folded, eyes closed, ambient lighting. I grew up half-believing that version, and it made God feel like someone I had to get presentable for before I was allowed to talk. I needed to put on my best face and best dress and shove my worries and fears into a box for a few hours on Sunday.
Prayer, for me, was scattered at best. A series of half-finished conversations that were a lot like being interrupted mid-word by an excited toddler trying to show you a stick because it was cool and theirs and they wanted me to marvel at it, too.
Getting my ADHD diagnosis this year, really put things into perspective for me about prayer. It wasn’t that I was terrible at prayer. My intention was to talk with God. My attention is what struggled to keep on the same track. I couldn’t sit still and pray and listen to that still, small voice because my brain was like a sieve. I felt defective because my thoughts drifted. Because I kept fidgeting.
But grief and time and good preaching has taught me otherwise. Grief doesn't wait for you to look holy. It shows up while you're driving carpool, mascara-streaked, radio too loud blasting hymns, and if God can't meet you there, in the Diet Coke and the minivan and the mess, then I don't know what the incarnation was even for.
So my quiet time looks like this most days: can open, Bible app up, one earbud in in case a child needs retrieving, and a prayer that starts less like a psalm and more like a text message to someone who already knows me too well to need the formal greeting. “Okay, so, today.” That's usually as far as the eloquence gets. I think that's fine. I think the God who counted sparrows can handle my run-on sentences and my rambling.
Sometimes the prayer just goes like: “I don’t know what to do. So please help me because You do.”
I’ve always loved talking about the Holy Spirit. How amazing that this supernatural and divine thing lives and prays for me when my ADHD is raging and I can’t get the words together. When I’m so stricken by loss and grief that I don’t know if saying that I’m angry is allowed. But this past year especially has taught me what it means to have faith: in a Holy Spirit that intercedes, in a Father that loves me and wants me to talk with him genuinely, a Savior named Jesus Christ that is my co-heir because of his taking on the sins of the world.
I think about that every time the can hisses open and I sit down in the two minutes I've got before the day requires me again. Sacred doesn't need better lighting. It just needs me to show up as I actually am, fizz and all.
