My God

O God, You are my God,
earnestly I seek You;
my soul thirsts for You,
my body longs for You,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

I have seen You in the sanctuary
and beheld Your power and your glory.
Because Your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify You.
I will praise You as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise You.

On my bed I remember You;
I think of You through the watches of the night.
Because You are my help,
I sing in the shadow of Your wings.
My soul clings to You;
Your right hand upholds me.

Psalm 63:1-8

the Real World

“What is more real; picking a rose or falling in love?”

Being worldly is often considered a good thing, it means that you presumably have traveled a lot, know about various cultures and are overall quite wise. Yet the Bible warns us against becoming too worldly, about becoming too concerned with earthly things.  Yet it is easy to see why we often do become so concerned with things of this world, it’s because we can see them, touch them, they seem more real to us.

In C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters there is a passage about how humans become more attached to the world the longer we are here: 

            “The truth is that the Enemy [God], having oddly destined these mere animals [humans] to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we [demons] must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry - the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon - are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time - assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience."

What we must remember is that even though we can see and touch the things on earth, they are not the most important things. The realm of things we cannot see but can only feel or experience with our Spirits are equally, if not more, real and certainly more important.

The question at the start of this post was asked in my English class my first year at University and it really made me think. Even though picking a rose is certainly a real thing, falling in love is as well. And falling in love can change your whole outlook on the world in ways that picking a rose couldn’t.

Now I know that it can be hard to make time for God when your day is full of papers, work, laundry, grocery shopping and whatever else it is that keeps you busy, but we have to remember that those are not the really important things in life. The thing of utmost importance is our relationship with God and the time we spend with Him. There is nothing more real than that.  

Glimpses

Sometimes you catch them,

A child discovering something new as pure joy overcomes him,

Love shared between an elderly couple as they still hold hands whilst walking down the street,

The way the light of the sunset catches on the waves,

Smiles and laughter shared between good friends,

A family sitting down together to share a well-earned meal at the end of a long day,

The smell of rain falling on the freshly cut grass in the summer time,

A new husband making breakfast for his wife,

The touch of baby wrapping her first around your finger for the first time,

A passerby stopping and sharing lunch with a homeless man.

All these and many more are the tiny glimpses of heaven that surround us. Glimpses of sheer joy, love, servanthood, community, peace, beauty, the list goes on and on.

Glimpses of our Heavenly Father Himself.

Exercise

It’s amazing how you can forget about something until you start working at it. About a week ago I started to exercising a bit more, which really doesn’t say much. Thanks to my mother’s genes I was blessed with a naturally slender figure and so I rarely felt the need to exercise. Nonetheless I’ve decided to start working out more and boy oh boy, do I have a lot of muscles I had forgotten about. After that first day, every move makes you aware of what each muscle does as you go about your daily routine.

For a while now I’ve been feeling as though God has drifted away somehow, or maybe it’s me who’s slipped away. It seems as if I know what I believe factually, but the emotion behind it is gone. I’ve been trying so hard to regain that relationship and once again feel as though the Holy Spirit is with me. But the challenging thing is, how do you make yourself feel something again? How do you make your soul feel the presence of the Almighty again?

I’d been struggling through this for quite a while when A.W. Tozer came to my rescue once again. His book, The Pursuit of God, (which I recommend to all of you), is an excellent guide for those who long to be closer to God but cannot seem to find their way (back) to God. The fourth chapter spoke the exact words that I needed to hear.

“As we begin to focus upon God the things of the spirit will take shape before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an inward revelation of the Godhead. It will give acute perception enabling us to see God even as is promised to the pure in heart. A new God-consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all. There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. More and more, as our faculties grow sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives,”

Different people may take Tozer’s words differently, but to me it was an encouragement to seek God’s hand in my daily life. Even though it feels as if God is far off, when I take the time to look at the things that happen day by day, I can see His hand working, even in small things. Just like with my exercising: by focusing on my muscles I’m more aware of them in my daily routine. By focusing on God in my daily life I see His work more clearly too.

You may be perfectly fine with your relationship with God, not feeling the need to seek His hand throughout your day. But that’s just like not working out because your body looks like it’s fine. Truth is, there is always room for improvement. And by exercising your “inner eyes” and looking for God you can grow stronger in body and spirit.

Words.