Devotions With Kids Around

"From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none..."

I think I have resigned myself to the fact that morning devotions will never be easy with a small child around the house. Especially not when her room is too small to leave her in there with the gate up for any length of time. If she is awake (and since Nathan works late, it's really hard to get up early enough in the morning to do my devotions before she wakes up), then she is either making lots of noise in her crib, or crawling around the living room getting in to everything and I have to keep one eye open while I pray. It's REALLY distracting. And therefore REALLY frustrating, because I have always found it difficult to concentrate on God's Word without my mind starting to wander into what I need to do that day or other random thoughts, and then if I have to supervise a kid at the same time, well my mind is just in a million different places. And I know that having good devotions each day is not the height of spirituality, nor is it commanded anywhere in the Bible (at least not in the sense of the modern Evangelical idea of sitting down for a specified period each day and following a routine of the reading of a passage, meditation and prayer), but I still want my time in God's Word to be meaningful and life-changing.

I guess what I am struggling to grasp in the midst of the busyness of homemaking and motherhood, neither of which have any immediate, tangible effects on the Kingdom like say, successful street evangelism, is how to live through the day with God's Word dwelling in me richly, and doing all things to God's glory. How exactly do you go about glorifying God by sewing a dress for your daughter or making dinner or scrubbing the kitchen floor or changing a poopy diaper? And how do you meditate continually on the Bible in the midst of doing these things?

How do you live as if you had no husband, no child, as if you had no dealings with the world (I Corinthians 7:29-35), and yet at the same time, care for that husband and child and deal with the world in a way that benefits the Kingdom? How do you stay single-minded and yet at the same time, tend to all your earthly, God-given responsibilities.

This is when it would be nice to have an godly, older woman around, who has been there, done that, and could offer some hard-earned wisdom. No one at our church has kids older than age 5 (except for one family who's away a lot) and for the most part these women are struggling with the same things.