Soul Sustenance: 5 Minutes with Jesus - Peace for Today

As a parent, it can be extremely hard to take care of yourself. We can find our stress levels rising in response to the length of our to-do lists, and the work is never done. In the midst of everything we have to do to take care of the family, where can we possible find five minutes alone?

Yet, those five minutes can have such an impact on the rest of the day. I find that if I take just a few minutes - five to fifteen - to myself in the morning, to read, meditate, pray, and reflect, that the rest of my day goes smoother. That's the idea behind 5 Minutes with Jesus: Peace for Today, a book I recently got to review. Sheila Walsh keeps these daily meditations short, to squeeze into whatever few minutes you can have to yourself. Their length makes it easy to get the main point without a lot of other distractions, and helps give a focus for the rest of the day.

Many of the Scriptures and words of wisdom are things that, in our heads, we've probably heard before. But taking a few minutes to reflect helps them really sink in and become more than just things we know, but things we feel. And that will have a greater impact on our days than anything else we could do in the first five minutes after we wake up.