Five-minute devotionals for the days you can't sit still

The standard advice is a quiet hour, early, with a notebook. For a season of life that is simply not available, and being told otherwise mostly produces guilt rather than devotion.

These are five minutes, and several of them do not require sitting down.

One verse, all day

Read a single verse in the morning. Not a chapter — one verse. Leave it where you will see it, and let it be the thing you return to when the day gets loud.

You will not study it. You will just carry it, which is a different and older way of holding scripture.

The one-line psalm

Open the Psalms anywhere and read until one line stops you. That line is the whole devotion.

Say it back. Argue with it if you want to. The Psalms can take it.

Praying the room

Walk through the house and pray for whoever belongs to each part of it. The bed, the high chair, the coat by the door.

This one works when you cannot be still, because it uses the moving as the structure rather than fighting it.

Prayer offered while folding washing is not a lesser prayer. It is the prayer of someone who has washing to fold.

Three sentences

• One thing you are thankful for
• One thing you are carrying
• One person who needs help more than you do

The Lord's Prayer, slowly

You already know it, which means you can pray it with your hands full. The discipline is not remembering it but slowing it down enough to mean it.

One line per task. One line per stair.

A word about the guilt

If you have been avoiding this altogether because five minutes felt like an insult to God, consider that the insult is more likely in believing He only meets people who have an hour.

Five minutes offered honestly for a season is not a placeholder for real devotion. In this season it is the real thing.