The Only Question My Spiritual Practice Needs

Most of us were handed a spiritual practice before we really knew what we needed. A devotional. A quiet time. A Bible reading plan. And for a lot of people, that works perfectly well — they get something real from it, and they stick with it for years. But some of us hit a wall. The practice got stale. The stories didn’t land. We kept showing up out of obligation, waiting for something to click, and eventually the silence told us it wasn’t working. The harder question — the one nobody really addresses — is what you do after that. What fills the space? How do you build something intentional when the framework you were given no longer fits?

That’s what this post is about. Not a critique of devotionals. Not an argument for any particular tool or tradition. Just an honest account of how I moved from a practice that wasn’t working to one that is — and the single question that made it simple.

The Problem with Devotionals (For Some of Us)

Let me be clear about something upfront: if you read a daily devotional and it genuinely feeds you, keep doing it. The goal of any spiritual practice is to connect with God, with Source, with the Divine — to create an intentional space for that connection to happen. If your devotional is doing that, it’s working. Full stop.

But for some of us, the format itself gets in the way. A typical devotional follows a predictable structure: a single Bible verse at the top, a brief story or anecdote to illustrate it, and a practical application to carry into your day. It’s a well-designed container. The problem is that not everyone receives truth through that container. I’m someone who doesn’t naturally connect with the storytelling layer. I wanted to go deeper into the text itself — to understand what the passage actually meant in context, not just apply it quickly and move on. The surface-level anecdote felt like it was slowing me down rather than helping me in.

I got more traction from devotionals like those written by John MacArthur or John Piper, where the format was less story-driven and more exegetical — working through a passage day by day, verse by verse, building understanding over time. That approach resonated with how I actually think. But even that eventually ran its course.

What I Built When Devotionals Weren’t Enough

For a season, I went further. I wrote my own devotional commentary on the book of James — over eighty lessons, working through the text verse by verse, helping readers understand the book in depth and apply it to daily life. I also spent years in the Christian Hip-Hop space writing devotionals for album releases — taking the key passage and theme of each song, writing the story and application, and helping artists give that content away free on their websites. I’ve been inside the devotional format from multiple angles. I understand what it does well.

But even after all of that, I kept circling back to the same honest admission: none of it was quite landing for me personally. And I think for a long time I treated that as a personal failure — a sign that something was wrong with my spiritual discipline rather than a signal worth paying attention to. It wasn’t failure. It was discernment in motion. The fact that something isn’t working for you is information. It doesn’t mean the tool is bad. It means it may not be your tool.

What My Practice Actually Looks Like Now

Here’s where I’ll lose some people, and I want to acknowledge that before I say it. My current morning practice includes reading the daily lesson in A Course in Miracles, a message from my friend Rebecca Kastl’s book Daily Moments with the Angels, and then journaling — using oracle cards or tarot cards as a prompt to listen, reflect, and hear what’s coming through for that day.

I know how that sounds to some ears. But here’s what I want to name clearly: the mechanism is identical to a devotional. When you pick up Our Daily Bread, you don’t choose the verse. Someone else chose it, and you receive it as what’s meant for that day. When I shuffle my deck and pull the card on top, I’m doing the same thing. I’m receiving what comes. I’m sitting with it. I’m asking what it has for me today. The intention is the same — to spend time with God, to listen, to let something speak into my day — and the structure is functionally the same. The only meaningful difference is the label on the outside.

This is the point I made at length in my previous post. The labels we put on spiritual content — Christian, secular, New Age — are doing more work than the content itself in most people’s discernment process. The label on the cover is functioning as the theological filter. And I think that’s worth examining.

The Filter I Actually Use

When I stepped back from label-based filtering, I needed something to replace it. And what I landed on is disarmingly simple. I ask one question:

Is this leading me to love?

That’s it. That’s the whole filter. Does this text, this tool, this practice — is it teaching love? Is it drawing love out of me? Is it pushing me to be more loving in the way I move through the world?

If the answer is yes, I examine it and use it. If the answer is no, I set it down.

I want to be clear that this isn’t something I invented. It’s rooted directly in the words of Yeshua himself. When asked what the greatest commandment was, he didn’t offer a list of approved resources. He said: love the Lord your God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else, he said, hangs on these two. That’s a love-first framework, given by the one I follow. It seemed worth taking seriously.

And if Paul is more your flavor, in Philippians 4:8 he gives a whole litany of things that we ought to think about. Is it true? Is it honorable? Is it just? Is it pure? Lovely? Commendable? If it checks any of those boxes, then it should get your stamp of approval according to Paul.

When I apply that filter to my current practice, it holds. The daily lessons in A Course in Miracles are fundamentally about removing the illusions that distort how we see each other and learning to see the way God sees — which is, at its core, a practice in expanding love and releasing judgment. The card pulls in my morning journal aren’t fortune-telling. They’re prompts for reflection that consistently push me toward more gracious, more present, more loving engagement with my own life and the people in it. Every single day, my practice is challenging me to love more deeply, to be more patient, to be more present. That’s not despite following Yeshua. That’s because of it.

A Question Worth Sitting With

I’m not suggesting you abandon your devotional or adopt mine. What I am suggesting is that the love filter is worth applying to whatever you’re already doing. Not as a test to pass or fail, but as an honest check-in.

Is your spiritual practice — whatever it looks like — making you more loving? Is it softening the edges of your judgment? Is it helping you show up better for the people in your life? Is it drawing you closer to God, or is it primarily reinforcing a sense of correctness about the tools you use?

Those aren’t trick questions. They’re the questions that matter. And they’re questions that transcend which tradition you practice in, which tools you use, or which label is on the cover of what you’re reading.

The goal has always been connection. Connection with God. Connection with what’s real. Connection with love itself.

If your practice is delivering that, it’s working. Keep going.

If it’s not, that’s worth paying attention to. Not as failure — as discernment in motion.

Want to go deeper? I work with people one-on-one to help them build a spiritual practice that actually fits who they are. Let’s work together.