This is going to be one of the blog posts where I take different ideas that have been floating around in my head and try to weave them together - sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't - here we go! The theme, in brief, is trying to think more about the things that matter using Christian meditation.
As I write this, we are right in the heart of Lent. My church doesn't practice Lent the way that many liturgical churches do, but I once learned that idea that Lent is a spring cleaning: a time to take inventory of things that we want to keep and things that we want to get rid of, in order to make space for God. So I do try to spend a little time in these weeks thinking about what could I change in my time and thought patterns (both what could I toss out and what could I add in) that would make more room for God. And there's a song that has given me inspiration in this year's spring cleaning - it's a Christian hip hop song called, "Take Me There" by Trip Lee. (Some of you may not have known that Christian hip hop is a thing - I linked to the song so you can get your first taste of it :). The line I've been thinking about a lot, which describes heaven, says, "A place where shadows give way to the real, and circumstances can't change the way that I feel."
First, let's look at "a place where shadows give way to the real". There's so much in this world that is fake, deceptive, and all about appearances - these shadows are everywhere, and they obscure the light for all of us. How beautiful, and how rare, is it to befriend someone that gets more authentic, more deep, more lovely the more you get to know them? (None of us will be 100% this way, but there are people who stand out as being more like this.) They put a ton of thought into the things that matter and hardly any thought into the things that don't. They follow the instruction of Philippians 4:8: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." I want to know these people, and I want to BE this person. But how do you get to be that person, living in this world with shadows everywhere?
The second part of the line is "circumstances can't change the way that I feel". Our culture urges us to follow our heart, which usually means follow your feelings. You see this message on t-shirts and in memes, and it sounds pretty great at first. The problem with feelings is, they go up and down - they don't always steer you the right way - they are enormously affected by your circumstances. And it's hard to sort out how much you're being ruled by circumstances when you're right in the middle of things. It never feels like my heart is being influenced by things like sleep deprivation, stress, hunger, illness, hormones; it never feels like advertisements influence me; it never feels like I'm being anything but rational when I follow my heart. But if I look back from the distance of years, it's much easier to see that circumstances have hugely changed the way I felt about all sorts of things. The Bible affirms that we shouldn't just follow the ups and downs of our feelings - Jeremiah 17:9 says: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" I want to be the person whose feelings are not ruled by circumstances, but who can attach my heart and its feelings to a sure and steady hope outside of myself. But again comes the question, how do you get to be that person?
Both of these things don't just happen. They are counter cultural, and counter to what comes easily. So how do we get there? One practice that I think will be helpful is Christian meditation. My pastor recently gave a talk on meditation, and he explained that it works well as the bridge between Bible reading and prayer. After you've taken in some ideas from Scripture, you take time to think about it, digest it, let it sink in, dwell in it. Find the pieces of reading that cause you to be astounded by God. And then taking the time to think about it and let it sink in is going to change how you pray, and with regular practice, change the kind of person you are. If you're dwelling on the things above more deeply and more often, it would hugely affect your ability to see the things that are real, to care about the things that matter and not care about the things that don't. And it would also sharpen your focus on the hope we have outside of this life, which would cause your feelings to be less battered about the difficult circumstances we all go through in this world.
So my goal going forward to is to spend more time in meditation. I would love to hear from those of you who regularly meditate about how you do it and the effects you have seen.
