T-Teens Trinity Baptist Youth

09/06/2023

What are you meditating on today?

Growling over God’s Word—הגה

“This Book of the Law [i.e., Torah] shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.” —Joshua 1:8

The Hebrew verb for meditate is hagah. But don’t conjure up the image of a Buddhist monk sitting in the lotus position chanting “Om.” Picture a lion growling over his prey (Isa. 31:4). Picture a dove cooing or moaning in distress (Isa. 38:14). The prophet Isaiah uses hagah to describe the sounds of both these animals. This is the voice of meditation.

Meditation, in other words, is not all about closing your eyes, saying nothing, and disappearing inside yourself. It is about focusing your eyes on the Bible, saying the words, and disappearing inside Christ. When you meditate, you are a lion crouching over its prey. You are the eater and the Word is your food. Take a bite, chew it, taste it, crunch the verbs, salivate over the nouns. There’s no rush. This is not McDonald’s. Savor the feast. Growl over the words you swallow. Let them echo from the chambers of your body. Let each one have its say. No word is unimportant. Each has a voice. Let them roll off your tongue. What you are eating is what you are saying. God’s Word becomes your word.

O Lord, teach us to delight in your Word, that we may meditate in it day and night.

(From my book, Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew)

08/09/2023

Love is not something we fall into; it’s a rough and rocky hill we commit ourselves to climb. Or, to change the metaphor, love is a story we decide to write together with another person. There will be paragraphs penned in the calligraphy of pure ecstasy, but there will also be chapters scribbled in pain.

The thing is, we don’t know what form or direction the narrative will take. The final chapter is not written until it’s lived.

What we’re devoting ourselves to is not a fairy tale, not a thriller, not a bestseller, but a simple story of sacrifice for someone else. We for them and (hopefully) they for us. But because it is the account of two sinners sharing the same bed, bank account, and bathroom counter, the narrative will become terribly messy and convoluted at times. There will be entire sections we wish we could blot out. Heated and vitriolic dialogues that embarrass us. And, along the way, plenty of happy surprises as well.

We’ll discover places in our hearts, and in the hearts of our beloved, that we didn’t even know existed.

That’s the way stories unfold. Unpredictable. Boring. Beautiful. Ugly. Riveting. We’ll find all of this and more when we commit to writing a story with another person to whom we say, “I love you.”

—from my book, Upside-Down Spirituality: The 9 Essential Failures of a Faithful Life

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Morris community senior adults! Come join us NEXT THURSDAY at 10am!

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