What’s more important Quality Time or Quantity Time?
Summertime is a special season of quality time in Family Ministry at New Cov!
In June we sent a team of 10 students to Zambia. This week there are 154 elementary kids at Overnight Camp. And next week, 12 students are going to serve in Memphis, Tennessee.
These short-term times of intense spiritual and relational connections are always powerful and memorable quality times of personal growth. There’s something unique that happens when we get outside of our comfort zones and our daily routines that helps us feel God’s presence more clearly. Getting into a steady stream of experiencing God and processing His word in a new way can change us forever.
Unfortunately, these “mountaintop moments” don’t last forever. They can’t. Eventually we have to come back home from every mission trip, camp session and family vacation. We don’t live there. We live here. But the good news is we don’t have to leave God behind on the mountaintop. He comes with us back to our daily lives.
That’s how relationships (should) work.
Whether it’s in your marriage, your family, or your personal devotional life–all relationships thrive with a healthy mix of quality time and quantity time. Special dates or getaways with your spouse are important. But if you only rely on date night and never talk the rest of the week–things are going to eventually wither! So also, we should not rely on camps or mission trips to keep us going for a year. If you really want your relationship with God to thrive, you will spend time talking and listening to Him every day.
As relationship specialist John Gottman teaches, “We build the partnerships and families of our dreams one hour at a time, one day at a time.”
That truth is “…your life isn’t established in big moments. Your life is established in 10,000 little moments… The transforming work of grace operates in 10,000 little moments more than it does in a series of two or three life-altering events”. –Paul David Tripp.
Don’t wither! Keep placing yourself in a steady stream of God’s word back home in your regular life. His presence and His grace are available to you wherever you go. His enduring word is just as transformative in your living room as it was at camp. God is just as faithful to His promises in Eastern Iowa as He was in Western Zambia!
“…but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” (Psalm 1:2-3).