I know I should have a consistent prayer routine. Read Scripture daily. Journal regularly. Maintain spiritual disciplines. Christians are taught these practices are essential for spiritual growth. But executive function challenges make consistent routines extraordinarily difficult.
Executive function includes skills like planning, organizing, initiating tasks, following through, and managing time. Many autistic people struggle with these, not from lack of motivation but from neurological differences in how our brains handle self-directed action.
I can want to pray every morning and still fail to do it consistently. I get hyperfocused on something else and forget. I can't make myself transition from one activity to another. The routine that worked last week suddenly feels impossible this week. I have the desire but not the executive function to implement it reliably.
Traditional spiritual formation advice often assumes neurotypical executive function. "Just set aside 30 minutes every morning." "Develop a consistent routine and stick to it." "Use discipline to overcome feelings." This advice isn't wrong, but it's incomplete for people whose brains don't naturally sustain routines without enormous effort.
For years, I felt like a spiritual failure. If I really loved God, wouldn't I pray consistently? If my faith were genuine, wouldn't I automatically make time for Scripture? The gap between my desires and my actual practices seemed to indict my spiritual state.
But I've come to understand that executive function challenges are neurological, not spiritual. God knows how my brain works. He doesn't judge me for struggling with initiation and follow-through any more than He judges someone with a physical disability for not running marathons.
This doesn't mean I abandon spiritual disciplines. It means I need different strategies than neurotypical approaches assume.
External structures help: I can't reliably initiate prayer through willpower alone, but I can respond to external prompts. Setting phone alarms works better than trusting myself to remember. Following a prayer app's notifications works better than self-directed prayer time. External structure compensates for weak internal executive function.
Routines linked to existing habits help: I struggle to create new standalone routines, but I can attach spiritual practices to existing ones. Praying while making coffee works better than "pray every morning." Reading Scripture before bed works better than finding an undefined "quiet time." Piggyback on habits that already work instead of creating separate ones.
Lower barriers help: The standard advice is to set aside extended time for deep spiritual practices. But for executive function challenges, that high barrier often means I do nothing. Five minutes of Scripture is better than zero because the "30-minute quiet time" felt impossible to initiate. Brief, frequent practices work better than long, infrequent ones.
Variety helps: Neurotypical advice emphasizes consistency—same time, same place, same practice. But autistic brains often crave novelty. Rigid sameness becomes boring and unsustainable. I do better rotating between different prayer methods, different Scripture reading approaches, different spiritual practices. The variety maintains interest and compensates for executive function challenges with routine.
Technology helps: Prayer apps, Bible apps, liturgy apps—these provide structure, prompts, and variety. Some Christians dismiss technology as distraction from authentic spirituality. But for executive function challenges, technology can be the difference between practicing spiritual disciplines and not practicing them at all.
Grace helps: Most importantly, I've learned to give myself grace. On days when executive function fails completely and I don't pray or read Scripture, God's love for me doesn't change. My value isn't based on perfect practice of spiritual disciplines. Some days, just getting through basic tasks is all I can manage, and that's okay.
This last point is crucial. Christian formation literature often emphasizes discipline, consistency, and effort. These aren't wrong emphases, but they can become crushing for people whose neurology makes sustained self-directed action difficult. We need theology that holds both spiritual disciplines and grace in tension.
Yes, spiritual practices matter. Yes, we should cultivate them. But no, our failure to practice them perfectly doesn't mean we're bad Christians. God's grace covers executive function challenges just as it covers every other human limitation.
Scripture itself provides examples of varied spiritual practice. Jesus prayed at different times, in different ways, for different durations. The Psalms show diverse approaches to prayer—short and long, structured and spontaneous, joyful and lamentful. Early Christian communities used diverse practices—formal liturgy, spontaneous gifts, silent contemplation, communal singing.
There's no single "right way" to practice spiritual disciplines. Neurotypical approaches that emphasize consistency and willpower work for some people. But autistic people often need different strategies that work with our neurology rather than against it.
I've also found that my hyperfocus, when it kicks in, can facilitate deep spiritual practice. When I get absorbed in studying Scripture or theology, I can sustain focus for hours without effort. This is the flip side of executive function challenges—difficulty initiating and sustaining self-directed routine, but exceptional ability to sustain engagement with intrinsically interesting material.
The key is finding what genuinely interests me rather than forcing myself through "should" practices. I can't make myself journal consistently, but I can write extended reflections when an idea captures me. I can't sustain formal prayer times, but I can pray spontaneously throughout the day when something prompts me. Working with my brain's natural inclinations rather than fighting them proves more sustainable.
Churches could help by offering diverse approaches to spiritual formation. Not everyone thrives on structured quiet times, accountability groups, or rigorous routine. Some of us need flexibility, variety, external prompts, and grace for inconsistency.
We could also be more honest about the role of executive function in spiritual practice. When someone struggles with consistency, the default assumption is often lack of commitment or spiritual immaturity. But it might be executive function challenges requiring different strategies, not deeper problems requiring repentance.
God meets us where we are, including in our neurological particularity. He doesn't require neurotypical executive function as a prerequisite for relationship with Him. He works with autistic brains—initiating challenges, hyperfocus tendencies, need for variety, difficulty with routine—because He designed them and knows how to work through them.
My inconsistent, varied, technology-assisted, grace-saturated spiritual practices might not look like the ideal described in Christian formation books. But they're genuine engagement with God given my actual neurology, and that's what matters. God doesn't grade us on neurotypical standards. He meets us as we are and works with what we've got.