My fast is not going well. My original intent for the fast was to wake up earlier to read the Bible and spend more time with God, but due to a lot of late nights with school and work stuff, I was waking up a lot later than expected.
For the longest time, I was feeling very guilty and ashamed of myself. After all, I was doing the exact opposite of what I intended to do to fast. I would still make some effort to read the Bible and spend time with God in spite of the lateness, but I still felt as if I wasn’t doing enough.
One day, God told me to not make spending time with Him a ritual, where if you didn’t do it a certain way, you were doing it wrong. I personally prefer Bible study, and was feeling guilty because I didn’t always have enough time for that, but there are so many ways of spending time with God, such as prayer, worship, and soaking, that I could do as well.
The key here is to pursue relationship, not ritual. Unlike Old Testament times, where you had to follow specific rules to sacrifice, worship the Lord, and approach His presence or else you died, we get to be in God’s presence and worship Him in all our imperfectness without constraints, and He welcomes it.
Jesus said in Matthew 11:30 that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Based off of this, I don’t think that God intended His relationship with us to be a burden or checklist of things we had to do. It can be as simple as a prayer in the morning or worship music in the car.
If you’re feeling like you have to spend time with God in a certain way, remember that your time with God doesn’t have to be a ritual, and you can always spend time with God in other ways. I think that in God’s eyes, He cares more about you spending time with Him than how you spent time with Him.