Teach us to be people who stay

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Teach us to be people who stay
I feel like the mug of clear hot water...lower in the tea bag...watch the burnt ember color swirl round the clear regular water as it works though the whole cup, changing completely how it tastes.  I've got teaching all around me this month, in the form of a yoga training program called Holy Yoga.  I imagine you will hear a lot more of the overflow of that from me as I grow. But now, I want to share with you some thoughts on prayer and meditation.   

In one of my curriculum books, "Eat This Book" (Peterson, 2006) (Author of The Message) the Hebrew word for meditate is discussed.  The word is hagah.  It is used in verses like Psalm 1:

" 1 Blessed is the one
    who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
    or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and who meditates (hagah), on his law day and night."

But, he points out, that Isaiah 31:4 uses it to refer to a lion growling over his prey:
“As a lion growls (hagah),
    a great lion over its prey—"

Peterson muses that his dog chewing his prized bone,  quiet seriously, "makes those low throaty rumbles of pleasure as he gnawed, enjoyed, and savored his prize, as Isaiah's lion did his pray." (p. 2) Interestingly, the SAME word as meditate in the other scriptures we might be familiar with. What on earth?


He says that this is a powerful metaphor for how we are invited to read and handle scripture, "like letting a very slowly dissolving lozenge melt imperceptibly in your mouth"

This is what meditation is.

Waiting until it REALLY sinks in...to your believing place.

I adore this scripture, Jesus  weaving together this idea of meditation and prayer, dwelling, abiding:

Mathew 6:6 (Message)

Here's what I want you to do:  Find a quiet, secluded place so you won't' be tempted to role-play before God.  Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage.  The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.

Meditation resets our daily (momentary) awareness of the with-God life; this idea coined by spiritual formation writers to describe the sort of integrated, abiding life Jesus invites us to.

Romans 12:1 (Message)

So, here's what I want you to do, God helping you:  Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around in life - and place it all before God as an offering.  Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. 

Meditation illuminates, makes real, vital and vibrant, our inner most place.  This place where all of our outer experience stems, our thoughts, feelings, spirit...which our outer lives are a complete outpouring of.  This unseen inner most place is the place where God's work is done in us.

He "frees us from dwelling with anything other than Him.  He shows us lies we have believed as truths, places of idol worship and patterns of behavior or thought that do not line up with the new self He is creating us to be.   But in order to do that, He has to dive down deep into the greatest recesses of our hearts.  " (Holy Yoga)
1 Corinthians 2:10 (Message)
10-13 The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along. Who ever knows what you’re thinking and planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that he not only knows what he’s thinking, but he lets us in on it. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that he is giving us. We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions.

Meditation asks us to surrender.  It is active surrender--"it requires us to continually participate, it is an intentional letting go of anyone or anything that is not God."  

It asks us to be a people who stay in spite distraction, hurriedness, of a lack of sensory affirmation.  Asks us to stay despite a lack of  feeling, a lack of sensical clicking, of understanding.   It is the letting go of my need to know, to understand, to feel.

It is not easy.  " It is messy, it is hard, it is so much easier to reach for the tree of knowledge than it is to sit in the mystery and be loved by God."  (Holy Yoga).  

But what we gain....Oh, how satisfying to turn over, melt, sink in that Truth that makes us whole and well. Renewing. Remaking. It is a practice, something that has to be cultivated. It is something I have learned only the tip of the iceberg of.  What I tasted, I want more of, I will surely pursue.


I am looking forward to teaching a class on this whole gigantic subject matter sometime soon.  Stay tuned for the invitation. I hope so much I will see you then and we can explore the riches of this "gifted transformation of the to talk state of the soul.  It is a renewal of the whole person from the inside". (Holy Yoga) 


Peterson.Eugene. 2006. Eat This Book. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI. 

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