Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. (Psalm 119:97)
Meditation is all the thing. You can’t flick through newspaper without someone telling you how absolutely marvellous was their two week stay in a Tibetan hut. Schools have been quick to adopt ‘mindfulness’ as the cure to all anxiety. As the world has grown noisier the desire for peace has become more widespread. At some stage we all want to cry “stop”.
In all of this the ancient, Biblical practice of meditation seems to have got lost in the race to more exotic Eastern practices. Rather than seeking to empty your mind, the idea is to focus it on God. This is done by either dwelling on a verse, or an action of God, or simply the reality of God himself. The idea is to chew this over so that it begins to spark in your mind, and soak into your thinking.
So perhaps you might read your Bible and stop when you are struck by a particular verse and phrase, something to memorise and keep in your mind. Maybe you could ponder a time of your life where God was particularly present. Perhaps you might dwell on the events of the crucifixion. It is these things which lie at the heart of Christian meditation.
These are things which serve to strengthen us, and to bring us delight in God so that we might say with the Psalmist: “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day”.
