Touching Reality: Cultivating Spiritual Rhythms in the Home
Every parent has experienced the struggle of trying to create and sustain healthy spiritual habits in the home. Even if you were a champion of prayer, Bible reading, or Scripture memory before you had kids (and, um, I wasn’t), it’s a completely different challenge to integrate these rhythms into busy family life.
Technology usually doesn’t help. For all the ease that technology provides, it also comes with an unwelcome bundle of problems—more noise, more connectivity, an expectation of quick-and-easy, constant interruptions. So if you’ve ever felt like your efforts at cultivating spiritual rhythms have crashed harder than a first-gen iPhone, join the club.
Connecting with God in a tech-frenzied world isn't simple, but it can get better. Even after enduring a pandemic that (among other things) skyrocketed our tech usage, we can reset. We can cultivate spiritual rhythms in our home. It can start by making it tangible.
Our Tangible God
Knowing our tendency to be easily distracted, God made worship tangible. The word “tangible” literally means “perceptible by touch.” This probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when we think of God—and for good reason. God is great, unchanging, eternal, other. He cannot be contained or controlled. We can’t wrap our minds around him, let alone our feeble fingers.
But this is one of the surprises of Scripture: the God who should be beyond our reach consistently makes himself tangible. The incarnation stands as the most obvious and stunning example: in Jesus, God made himself flesh and blood. Tangible, just like us.
Even before Jesus was born, God encouraged tangible acts of worship. In the Old Testament, for instance, one of the most consistent responses people have after meeting with God is to construct an altar.[1] The altar served an immediate purpose—a location for a burnt offering—but it also acted as a tangible prompt for future generations: “These stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever” (Joshua 4:7).
And then there is the Passover, the most prominent event of the Old Testament. This annual celebration of God delivering his people from bondage in Egypt was incredibly tactile. God could have told his people to simply recount the Exodus story. Instead, he made it a rhythm people could touch and taste: eat this bread; eat this lamb.[2]
Jesus kept spiritual practices tangible too. At his final meal with the disciples, Jesus elevated the Passover tradition, taking the tangible elements of bread and wine and giving them fresh meaning. The bread would be his body, the wine his sacrificial blood. But while providing new meaning, he still kept the practice tangible: keep eating this bread; keep drinking this wine.[3]
Jesus knew that we flesh-and-blood creatures would need a tangible reminder of truth. So instead of a lengthy, theological explanation, he said, “Here, have some bread.”
Start with Something You Can Touch
Just as God gave tangible reminders to aid his people in worship rhythms, we can use tangible reminders in our homes to help our families turn their attention to God and to one another.
All of the objects in our homes nudge us toward something. The challenge is to replace objects that can push us and our kids into isolation (video games, smartphones, etc.) with objects that encourage true connection with God and others. Interestingly, with some helpful prompts in our home, not only can we cultivate spiritual rhythms for our kids, but our kids can cultivate spiritual rhythms for us.
Now, to be clear, the mere existence of Christian stuff may not move you to worship as often as something you have to literally pick up. Take a look at the items in your room right now. Do they help you turn your gaze to God?
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Start with some tangible practices for yourself like:
Putting a Bible on your bedside table
Leaving a stack of Bible memory verses in a high traffic area (maybe your front door or car)
Placing a prayer jar in the kitchen and writing requests on strips of paper
Stashing your phone under your journal, so you have to physically pick up your journal first—even if only to move it out of the way
Then, involve your kids. Welcome their curiosity as you experiment with new objects in the home:
Invite them to reach into the jar for a prompt and then reach out to God in prayer
Add another stack of Bible memory verses—this time in the high traffic area of…the potty
Place a pretty kneeling pad beside your child’s bed
Create a “treasure chest” in which you can regularly stash your smartphones away
Given the chance, our children can surprise us by their willingness to adopt a spiritual rhythm, especially if that rhythm has a tangible element to it. Our kids can even (quickly!) become much more diligent in their spiritual rhythms than us. My seven-year-old daughter, for instance, jots down prayer requests much more often than me, challenging my wife and me to carry all things to God in prayer. And my three-year-old son is a stickler for the Bible story during his bedtime routine.
Cultivating spiritual rhythms in a fast-paced, media-saturated world takes time. The good news is you can take a tangible step today. Start with something you can touch.
[1] Genesis 8:20, 12:7, 22:9, 35:7; Exodus 17:15; Joshua 4:1–7
[2] Exodus 12–13
[3] Luke 22:14–23
