Hey Friend -

Pursuing holiness with a busy schedule can feel complicated.

I travel for work. Often.

As the list in the back of my Bible tells me (yes, I keep track of these sorts of things in a weird way), I’ve spent 91 nights this year in a hotel. My job as a congregational developer in the UMC has me covering an entire state. Many days, I am by myself, I wrap up meetings in the evening, and then return to a hotel room.

When I was in my 20s and getting serious about Christianity, I was fascinated with monasticism. I even had a street art project of making these wooden monks and leaving them in random places as some sort of commentary on keeping holiness in the regular world.

Going to seminary made it a bit worse. I remember a few friends and I dragged our wives to a showing of a documentary calledInto Great Silence, about the life of Carthusian monks living in France. We laughed afterwards about the situation. One of the couples was only a few days back from their honeymoon. The wife quickly made jokes about how that was exactly the thing a newlywed wanted to know her new husband was interested in.

My curiosity about this life wasn’t about silence or living alone. It was about crafting a life with a greater focus on pursuing the presence of Christ and our own sanctification.

Fast forward 20 years.

In my mid-40s. No longer a local church pastor, but working at a higher level. I survived nearly dying in 2019. Mortality and the spiritual life have been different since then. I’ve also gone through the wringer psychologically and in every other way. I came out the other side even more focused on time and holiness.

This is about realizing that all of us, in whatever life might find us, can pursue greater holiness. This isn’t about productivity, but taking and making the time to pursue the presence of Christ. John Wesley talks about this in his sermon “On Redeeming the time.”

You must not therefore consider how small a fault it is to rise late; but how great a misery it is to want the spirit of religion, and to live in such softness and idleness as make you incapable of the fundamental duties of Christianity

Often, this means realizing the spaces we have to redeem that time.

The last few months, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to redeem my road time. Especially the hours I spend in hotel rooms.

Here is what I have done.

1. I always travel with something to read and reflect on. Hotel lobbies can be great reading rooms.
2. I travel with my full devotional kit, and wake up early as I normally do to spend an hour in scripture and prayer. In the evenings, I have time to continue in deep dives into books of the Bible I am slowly reading (It’s Jeremiah right now).
3. I write. I published two books this year, and the majority of them have been written in hotel rooms or lobbies.
4. Realize I have spaces of extended prayer and reflection. I can look back in my journals over the past year and see a higher page count on those travel days. It’s a back-and-forth in prayer, scripture, reflection, and working on my own sanctification.
5. I have a pretty heavy screen time limiter on my phone. I get an hour of social media time, before 9 am and after 6 pm. Yes, I can hit the ignore button, but that really doesn’t build up a life of reflection. I used to waste time scrolling. Not anymore.

Redeem the time.

I am in a season where I find myself both busy and with large amounts of time I could fill with idleness. YouTube rabbit holes, watching seasons of shows on streaming, or just scrolling.

In whatever season of life you are in, there is a way to redeem time. To take on that focus of monasticism. Removing distractions and orienting ourselves towards deeper communion with Jesus.

Chad