How to Develop a Quiet Time with God — Brother Lawrence’s Hidden Method
⏱ 12 min read
You have tried it. The Bible open on the kitchen table at half past six. The notebook to the left. The candle lit. The mug of tea. The page of the devotional you bought at the women’s conference. You did it for nine days in a row and then missed a Saturday, and the missed Saturday became a missed Sunday, and the candle is now a slightly-melted-down thing at the back of the cupboard and the devotional has been on chapter four since March. The shame of the lapsed quiet time is its own quiet weight — the sense that other Christians have figured it out, that you keep almost getting it right, that something about your specific life will not let the morning hour hold.
What if the problem was never the candle, the chair, or the half past six. What if the modern quiet time — the bounded thirty-minute appointment in the early morning — is a small recent invention, and the older Christian practice of a quiet time with God was a different thing entirely, a slower thing, a hidden thing, a thing that did not break when the Saturday went sideways. Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth-century lay brother who washed dishes and mended sandals in a Parisian monastery and became the most quoted teacher of quiet practice in five centuries, would tell you the modern morning-appointment quiet time is the wrong shape. He kept his quiet time differently, and his method held for forty years through a working kitchen. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow practice into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take it after the article. For now — read slowly. This is how to have a quiet time with God in the way the older Christians actually did, which has very little in common with the morning-appointment listicle.
The practice we lost
The modern quiet time is a discrete, bounded, scheduled event. It has a start time and an end time. It has a fixed location — usually the chair at the kitchen table. It has required components: Bible reading, prayer, journaling, perhaps a devotional or a worship song. It is, in shape, a meeting. You show up to the meeting, you do the meeting, you leave the meeting, and the rest of the day happens outside the meeting.
The problem is that the rest of the day is twenty-three and a half hours long, and the meeting was thirty minutes. The structure quietly teaches the soul that God is met in the meeting and that the rest of the day is something else — the working part, the household part, the secular part, the part outside the quiet time. When the meeting is missed, the day is therefore without God entirely. The quiet time has become the only door, and a single missed door closes the whole house.
This is not how the older Christians thought about it. The quiet time, for Brother Lawrence and the long tradition he sits inside, was not a meeting. It was a frequenting. You did not meet God once at half past six. You returned to Him many small times across the day — at the kitchen sink, in the corridor, at the moment of putting on your shoes, at the small pause between two tasks — and the quiet time was the cumulative effect of dozens of small returns, not the bounded performance of one big appointment.
Lawrence describes the inner shape of this hidden quiet time in The Practice of the Presence of God:
“Thus I continued some years applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my work, to the presence of God, whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Read it twice. Even in the midst of my work. Lawrence did not have a quiet time in the modern sense. He had a long, slow, hidden practice of returning his mind to God across the day, in the midst of his work, considering Him always as with me, often as in my heart. The dishes were not outside the quiet time. The kitchen was the quiet time. The corridor was the quiet time. The mending of the sandal was the quiet time. The quiet time had grown until it was the whole day, and the whole day had become the quiet time, because the returns were small and frequent and the soul had learned to live there.
This is the hidden method. It does not collapse when Saturday goes sideways, because there is no single appointment to miss. It does not depend on the candle, the chair, or the half past six. It depends only on the small daily practice of returning the mind, gently, to the presence of God, often as in my heart, across whatever shape the day actually has.
What the older Christians did
Lawrence’s method, and the older Christian practice of quiet time underneath it, had three movements. They are simple, and the simplicity is part of the practice.
The first movement is the small return. You set a small, regular, easy moment in the day at which you return your mind to God. Two minutes. Maybe three. Not the half-hour appointment. The small return. Lawrence’s small returns were attached to things he was already doing — the beginning of a meal, the picking up of a tool, the moment of stepping from one room to the next. Each return was brief. Lord, I notice You. Thank You. Stay with me through this next bit. That was the whole of it.
The second movement is the gentle bringing-back. Your mind will wander. Lawrence was extremely clear about this — he wandered as much as anyone, and his method assumed wandering. The practice was not to prevent wandering. The practice was to bring back gently, without alarm, the moment you noticed. The bringing-back was the practice. The wandering was the precondition, not the failure.
The third movement is the long shape. The small returns and the gentle bringings-back, repeated for weeks, then months, then years, accumulate into a practice — not a performance, a practice — in which the soul has slowly learned to live near God across the whole day. The half-hour morning appointment is not abandoned; it is simply demoted from being the whole quiet time to being one small return among many. The quiet time is now the whole life. The morning is the slow opening of it.
Lawrence names what this looks like once it has settled:
“Gradually become accustomed to worship Him in this way; to beg His grace, to offer Him your heart from time to time; in the midst of your business, even every moment if you can.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Gradually become accustomed. That is the older voice on how to have a quiet time with God. Gradually. Not in a week. Not in a sprint of nine consecutive mornings. Gradually — across months, in small returns, in the midst of your business, every moment if you can. The vocabulary is not the vocabulary of the modern appointment. It is the vocabulary of a long slow apprenticeship.
(If the wider practice of presence is new to you, what Brother Lawrence meant by practicing the presence of God walks the longer arc of his teaching. If the difficulty is hearing God across the noise, how to recognize God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer is the companion piece. And if the prayer side of the same practice has been collapsing in parallel, how to pray without ceasing — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method walks the prayer-side equivalent.)
The slow practice for you
Here is the older method, walked as a starting place.
Pick one small return to begin with. One. Not seven. Lawrence built up over years. You will too.
A good first return is the kettle. Each time the kettle boils, you return your mind to God for the thirty seconds it takes to finish boiling. The return is brief. Lord, I notice You. Thank You for this small pause. Stay with me through the next hour. That is the whole return. Then you make the tea, and the day goes on. The kettle has become a quiet time, several times a day, lasting half a minute each.
After a week, the kettle is automatic. Add another return. Possibly the moment you sit down at the desk. Lord, this work. Stay with me. Possibly the moment you open the door to the school yard. Lord, this child. Stay with us. Possibly the moment you fold a piece of laundry. Lord, this household. Thank You. Each return is short. Each return is attached to a thing you were already doing. Each return is gentle.
After a month, the small returns have multiplied. You are returning your mind to God six or eight or ten times a day, without effort, in the midst of ordinary things. You are now having a quiet time with God — not at half past six, but across the day. The total is far more than the half-hour appointment ever delivered. The shape is far more sustainable, because no single missed Saturday can collapse it.
Underneath the small returns sits a longer optional one — a ten-minute slow sit, ideally in the morning, ideally with one verse and one minute of breath and one honest sentence. The longer sit is good. The small returns are the practice. If only one can hold in a given season, the small returns are the one to keep.
Pause here, before reading the next section. The body that has been carrying the shame of every collapsed morning routine — let the shoulders lower by an inch. Let the breath have one slower exhale. The practice you are reading about is not another performance to fail at. It is a hidden method, attached to things you were already doing — the kettle, the door, the desk — that has held for ordinary Christians across centuries because it asks so little and gives so much. The body can release the bracing.
Why small returns hold where the morning hour did not
The morning hour requires will. You have to choose to get up, choose to sit down, choose to open the Bible, choose to keep going for thirty minutes against the pull of the phone and the to-do list and the children waking. The will is finite. After two weeks of hard mornings, the will runs low, and the practice collapses.
The small returns require noticing, not will. The kettle is already happening. The door is already being opened. The desk is already being sat at. You do not have to choose the return; you only have to notice the moment the return can attach to. Noticing is renewable in a way will is not. You can run out of will by 4pm; you cannot run out of noticing. The older method is built on the renewable thing rather than the depletable one.
Lawrence understood this practically. His monastery did not exempt him from work; he was washing dishes for fifty other monks twice a day, in a hot seventeenth-century kitchen, for forty years. He did not have the luxury of a half-hour morning quiet time, and he found a way to keep an even deeper quiet time inside the working day. The method is not optional gentleness; it is the genuine older Christian craft of how to have a quiet time with God when the modern half-hour shape will not fit.
The mid-article rest
The slow practice we are walking has its 140-day form already laid out for you in the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women. One short page per slow day, with the structure for the small returns, the held verse, the honest evening sentence — Lawrence’s hidden rhythm, made into a quiet companion for the woman whose morning hour has collapsed once too often.
What it feels like after three months
You will not have a better quiet time. You will have a different shape of life. The day will be full of small Godward moments rather than punctuated by one bounded one. You will catch yourself, walking from the kitchen to the bedroom, having said something to Him without having decided to. You will notice the small returns happening on their own at the desk, at the school gate, at the moment of closing the laptop. The practice has slipped from being a thing you remembered to do to being a thing your soul does because it has, slowly, gradually become accustomed.
Lawrence describes this settled quiet — what the hidden method feels like once it has become normal:
“Ever since that time I walk before God simply, in faith, with humility, and with love.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Simply, in faith, with humility, and with love. This is the older voice of the long quiet time. Not impressively. Not dramatically. Not as a series of beautifully performed morning hours. Simply — across years, in small returns, in the midst of the day, with the soul slowly remembering that He is there. The hidden method, kept for long enough, becomes a whole life walked before Him without strain.
(For the prayer side of the same patient attention across morning and evening rhythms, the sibling article how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers walks the older daily-prayer shape. For the prayer-for-husband companion, how to pray for your husband — Murray’s counsel for the praying wife is the next slow piece.)
What to do on the days that go sideways
You will have sideways days. The illness, the household crisis, the long working shift, the depleted Sunday. The hidden method does not punish the sideways day, because there is no single appointment to miss. The kettle still boiled. The door was still opened. The desk was still sat at. Some of the small returns happened automatically even on the worst day; the practice has run quietly underneath the chaos. You did not, in fact, miss a quiet time. You had the quiet time anyway, in small fragments, in the middle of the mess.
That is the hidden method’s particular gift to the modern Christian woman whose life will keep going sideways for the rest of her ordinary days. The quiet time is not in danger because the schedule is not the foundation. The small return is the foundation, and the small returns are renewable, attached to ordinary things, gentle in their bringing-back, and cumulative across the years. This is how to have a quiet time with God in a way that holds — not by mastering the morning, but by quietly returning, again and again, across the whole shape of the actual day.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page per slow day, with the structure for the small returns, the held verse, the honest sentence — Brother Lawrence’s hidden quiet-time rhythm, made into a daily companion built for the woman whose morning hour has finally stopped holding.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Brother Lawrence’s slow vocabulary — gradually become accustomed, even in the midst of my work, simply, in faith, with humility, and with love — into a daily companion built for the woman ready to swap the bright performed morning hour for the older hidden method that holds.
