Taking Time to Sit on the Porch

When’s the last time you sat - just sat? Samantha Decker sits us down in place for a very good reason.

Elisa

Taking Time to Sit on the Porch

By Samantha Decker

When my husband and I moved, we began praying for our new neighbors. We also challenged ourselves to meet every person on our street within the first few weeks of moving in. I had my kids help me bake cookies, and we hand-delivered cards with our phone numbers on them, letting each neighbor know we were praying for them.

However, I knew in order to create margin, I needed to do more. I decided to become a “front-porch person.” My husband is a gifted woodworker and one of the first projects I asked him to craft was a porch swing. He built a beautiful swing out of pine and hung it for me within the week.

I began setting aside time each day to sit on my swing. As I sat and swayed back and forth, I started praying for neighbors to come out with their kids, or check their mail, or take their trash out. And when they did, I’d make an effort to have a conversation with them.

My time on the swing became the highlight of my day. Some days, my boys would play happily for an extended period, and other days there would be full-on two-year-old meltdowns right in the front flower bed. But the quantity of time and external circumstances weren’t what mattered. God was softening my heart, opening my eyes, and slowing my pace through porch-sitting.

To be honest, there was a time in my life when sitting on a porch swing would have felt like a waste. I would’ve come up with a list of a hundred other things needing to be done instead. At the peak of my hurry, I believed sitting was pointless and idle.

This belief is a lie.

Do you have a hard time just sitting? Are you so caught up in productivity that intentionally slowing for even a few moments feels wasteful? Is your instinct to look at your phone the second you stop moving?

Let me challenge you with this: God works while we wait. Through sitting on my porch swing and praying for my neighbors, I was able to deepen relationships and meet my neighbors’ needs simply by slowing down and looking for God-given opportunities.

When God tells us to love our neighbor, he doesn’t just mean the people right next door. But it does include the people right next door.

In what ways might he be calling you to be a front-porch person too? At work? Your kid’s school? Soccer practice? To the cashier at the grocery store or the server at the restaurant? Here’s the point: being a front-porch person is less about the location and more about being present and available for the Lord to use you as he wills.

Adapted from Unhurried by Samantha Decker (© 2025). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.

Samantha Decker is a wife, mom, writer, and above all, a follower of Jesus. She is passionate about encouraging believers to deepen their walk with Jesus through discipleship relationships and an unrelenting love for the Word of God. She is the author of the recently released book, Unhurried: An Invitation to Slow Down, Create Margin, and Surrender Control to God. She and her husband, Dustin, live in Oklahoma and enjoy serving in their local church, trying new restaurants (especially if it’s Tex-Mex), and adventuring with their three rambunctious boys. You can connect with her at samanthadeckerwrites.com