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Every summer, the same thing happens.
You had something going. Maybe it wasn’t perfect – maybe it was just opening your Bible a few times a week, or a devotional you actually liked, or even just a few minutes of prayer in the car. But it was something. And then June hit.
Now it’s weeks later and you can’t remember the last time you did anything that felt like intentional time with God, and the shame is so loud you’ve started avoiding your Bible entirely, which makes the shame louder, which makes you avoid it more, and here you are wondering what is wrong with you that you can’t just be consistent.
Here’s what I want to tell you: nothing is wrong with you. And the thing that’s actually breaking down isn’t your faith – it’s the container it was living in. Summer took the container. Your faith is still there.
Why Summer Hits Different for ADHD Brains
Here’s something that surprised me about my own patterns: my faith routine is actually easier in the winter. Which sounds completely backwards – winter is dark and cold and you’d think the last thing your brain wants is to sit down and be reflective. But for my brain, it works better. Because winter comes with structure. There’s a school schedule. There’s a routine. There’s a container.
Summer doesn’t have a container. And for me personally, my schedule is incredibly chaotic due to having two different custody schedules – so sometimes I have one kid, sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes none. There’s no baseline. There’s no typical week. The chaos is the variable, and it’s always changing.
And then whatever else is hard in your life doesn’t stop being hard just because it’s summer. My current season has included a lot of stress – legal stuff, and losing our dog Ranger, which was incredibly difficult and traumatic, and I’m having a really hard time recovering from it. Grief and exhaustion don’t care that it’s June. Your nervous system is still trying to process everything, on top of the structural collapse that summer brings.
So when your faith routine falls apart in summer? It’s not a spiritual failure. It’s math.
For neurotypical people, summer is a disruption. For ADHD brains, summer is a full system reset. ADHD brains are heavily dependent on external structure to regulate attention, time, and follow-through – we use the school calendar, the carpool schedule, the predictable rhythms of other people’s needs as invisible scaffolding for our own functioning. And in June, that scaffolding collapses.
The Shame Cycle That Actually Does the Damage
I want to be really specific about this, because I don’t think we talk about it honestly enough: the season isn’t what damages your relationship with God. The shame spiral the season triggers is what does the damage.
This is how it goes, and tell me if this sounds familiar. You miss a few days of quiet time. The shame kicks in. And because the shame is sitting there waiting at the door, you start avoiding anything faith-related – your Bible app feels heavy, your devotional feels like a reminder of how behind you are. So you don’t open it. Which makes the shame louder. Which makes you avoid it more.
Then the shame builds to the point where you force yourself to do it. And then it’s not enjoyable, and it’s not peaceful, and you don’t get much from it – you do it out of obligation, which then damages your relationship with God, and then it just repeats and repeats and repeats, and the shame just builds and builds and builds, and you don’t actually have any genuine connection.
Relationships don’t work on obligation alone. We don’t have friendships – real, genuine friendships – out of obligation. You don’t maintain those relationships by just doing things entirely out of obligation. Sure, there’s going to be times that you don’t feel like reaching out to a friend, but you know what’s the best move. There’s going to be times like that in faith too. But relationships are built organically – they’re built on love and trust and mutual adoration and respect and mutual effort, and that doesn’t come out of purely obligation.
And here’s where it gets really important: the enemy – and I use that word intentionally – doesn’t necessarily need you to renounce your faith or leave the church or hate Christ. He just needs you off track a little. He just needs your relationship with Christ to turn into a religion that just goes through the motions. Because a faith that’s just motions isn’t actually transforming anything. Matthew 25 is pretty clear that there are people who will have done miracles in Jesus’ name who will still be turned away – not because they didn’t perform the religious acts, but because their connection with Him wasn’t genuine. Performance isn’t relationship.
The shame cycle is what turns your faith into performance. And breaking the cycle starts with removing the shame – not with finding a better routine.
If you’re in the middle of that cycle right now and need somewhere to start, the Noise Journal was built exactly for this – one hour to identify what’s actually creating noise between you and God, with zero shame attached. It’s free. Start there.
What “Removing the Shame” Actually Looks Like
I know “remove the shame” can sound like something you’d put on a motivational poster, so let me be specific about what this actually means in practice, because it’s changed everything for me.
Removing the shame means changing the goal. When the goal is “complete my quiet time,” you’re measuring yourself against a performance standard. And when you miss it – which you will, because life – the shame is the natural consequence of falling short. That’s just how performance measurement works.
When the goal is connection with God, the criteria shift entirely. Connection can happen anywhere. It can happen in thirty seconds. It can happen in ways that don’t look anything like what Christian culture has decided devotion looks like.
I’m fortunately able to, for the most part, avoid that cycle now because I’ve worked so hard to destigmatize my faith and how my ADHD affects my ability to live out and execute my faith from a practical standpoint. It seems like I very much go in cycles and in waves – and I think probably most ADHDers would agree. We just get to choose what are the steps of that cycle. What am I going to allow to continue?
So even finding just the tiniest little piece that I can do to connect with God makes all the difference. Even something as simple as when I walk by my window and look at my backyard – every single time I just am so incredibly grateful for my backyard and for the beauty that God has placed in my life. That’s a little connection point with God for me.
Another thing I often do is open the YouVersion app on my phone and just read the verse of the day. They have a devotional, they have a guided prayer, they have other pieces you can do – but even just the act of opening the app and reading the verse of the day is a touch point, and it often leads to something else. Yesterday the verse was in Amos 5, and there was just one verse, but I ended up going and reading the entire chapter, and then journaling some thoughts on it, and then I’m actually working on an entire podcast episode about Amos 5. That whole flow came from a place of organic, genuine curiosity, because I just told myself: okay, I’ll take this one teeny tiny step and open the app and read this one verse.
Finding those touch points that often lead to a little rabbit trail of curiosity – that can be really important and beneficial and effective. One tiny step led to a rabbit trail. The rabbit trail was fueled by genuine curiosity. And the curiosity only showed up because there wasn’t a wall of shame blocking the door.
If you’ve ever wrestled with doubt and uncertainty in a season like this – wondering if God is even there when your routines collapse – that episode is worth a listen.
Why “Just Sit Down and Do It” Doesn’t Work for ADHD Brains
Let me push back on something, because this advice is everywhere in Christian spaces and I think it causes real harm.
Things that definitely don’t work are just very neurotypical advice – like, well, we all have trouble focusing, so just sit down and do it. God requires our devotion, and so sometimes you just have to do something you don’t want to do. And while that’s absolutely true – while there are plenty of things we need to do in life that we simply don’t want to do – I don’t think our relationship with Christ, our connection to Christ, needs to be on that list.
It’s like telling someone with a slow metabolism: just eat less and move more. Technically true. Not actually helpful. And deeply dismissive of the real neurological difference in how that person’s body works. ADHD isn’t just a focus problem – it affects motivation, task initiation, emotional regulation, working memory, and time perception, all at once, all the time. Telling an ADHD brain to just discipline your focus is not a strategy. It’s a way of making that person feel morally inferior for something neurological.
And shame doesn’t motivate ADHD brains – it paralyzes them. The more ashamed we feel about not doing something, the harder it becomes to initiate that thing. So the neurotypical advice – which essentially amounts to “feel bad about not doing it until you do it” – is not just unhelpful. It actively makes things worse.
What God Actually Requires (Spoiler: It’s Not Your Color-Coded Bible)
Micah 6:8: “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Not: sit down at your kitchen table with your Bible and your highlighters and make sure you check off every single box and answer every single question in your devotional in complete sentences. Not: have a consistent morning routine seven days a week. Not: make sure your faith practice looks exactly like the women in your Bible study.
And yet the message that gets absorbed – especially in Christian women’s spaces – is that devotion has a specific aesthetic. That if your Bible isn’t annotated and color-coded, you’re giving God Cain’s offering instead of Abel’s. That framing puts your performance as the offering. And when your performance is the offering, any shortfall becomes a moral failure.
But here’s what Jesus actually measured devotion by: willingness. Openness. The orientation of your heart.
The woman at the well – by every standard of who counted as a good religious person in that culture, she failed every single test. Samaritan. Woman. Married multiple times. Living with someone outside of marriage. She was the last person who should have been included. And Jesus not only talked to her – he used her to bring his message to an entire group of people who had been looked down on for generations. He saw past every external marker of unworthiness and saw her heart. Her willingness.
So if summer wrecked your routine, and you haven’t opened your Bible in three weeks, and you feel like a fraud – what does Jesus actually say about that? Not “you should have tried harder.” More likely: here you are. That’s enough. Let’s talk.
Building Something That Actually Works in Summer
I want to be clear: I’m not saying routines are bad or that structure doesn’t matter. Structure matters enormously for ADHD brains – we’ve already established that. The question is: what do you do when the structure is gone?
The answer, for me, is touch points over routines. Here’s what that looks like practically:
- Identify your lowest-friction entry point. For me it’s the YouVersion app. For you it might be a physical Bible on your nightstand, a podcast in the car, a single song that centers you. What’s the thing that requires the least activation energy to start?
- Make the commitment so small it can’t fail. Not “do my quiet time.” One verse. One song. Look out the window and name one thing you’re grateful for. The commitment is the touch point, not the output.
- Remove the measurement. You’re not tracking streaks. There’s no gold star for doing it every day. The only question is: did this moment create a point of genuine connection with God, even for thirty seconds?
- Follow curiosity when it shows up. If one verse leads to reading the whole chapter, follow it. If a prayer leads to journaling, go there. The curiosity only shows up consistently when shame isn’t blocking the entrance.
- Expect the waves. ADHD brains go in cycles and in waves – and most ADHDers would probably agree. We just get to choose what the steps of that cycle are. What are you going to allow to continue? There will be weeks of deep connection and weeks where the best you’ve got is a grateful glance out the window. Both count. What you’re choosing is what happens inside the wave.
Summer isn’t the enemy of your faith. Shame is.
Ready to figure out what’s actually creating noise between you and God?
The Noise Journal is a free, one-hour guided journal designed to help you identify the biggest sources of noise keeping you from closeness in your faith – and create a simple, sustainable plan to tackle them. No highlighters required. No perfect morning needed. Just one honest hour with Jesus.
