Someone asked me a simple question recently: How is your spiritual life?
I started answering with a list.
Volunteering. Serving. Showing up. Participating. Being useful.
It sounded right. It even felt right, for a moment.
Then I caught myself.
I hadn’t answered the question. I had answered a different one: How much are you doing for God? And I had quietly let that answer stand in for the one that was actually asked.
My spiritual life isn’t the list.
It’s the quiet underneath it.
Centering prayer. Silence. Walking by the river. Feeling His presence without needing to produce anything in that moment. Discernment. Obedience that comes from intimacy, not pressure.
The list is real. It matters. But it isn’t the same thing.
This is an easy substitution to make, and an easy one to miss, because both answers can look like faithfulness from the outside.
But what’s actually being measured underneath them is different.
Martha of Bethany gives us a picture of this.
She was in the kitchen, doing the work hospitality required, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. Martha wasn’t wrong to serve. But somewhere in all that serving, she became distracted from the One she was serving.
“One thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:42
Leaders are especially prone to this substitution because we’re trained to answer with evidence.
Show the fruit. Show the output. Show that the time was well spent.
But activity is not the same as intimacy.
Doing for God is not the same as being with God.
So ask yourself the same question I was asked.
Not What am I doing for God?
How is my relationship with Him, underneath everything I’m doing?
If your honest answer is a list, it might be worth sitting with what the list has been standing in for.
This is the same pattern I write about in leadership, where the visible activity quietly substitutes for the thing it was supposed to express. Same mechanism, different context.
If this resonates, I’d love to continue the conversation at Kingdom Business Connection.
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