How to pray the words, "My body longs for God" (Psalm 63:1)

Psalm 63:1 says, "My body longs for you." What does it feel like to physically long for God? How might longing for God contributes to your happiness? And how can you engage in this kind of prayer? Here are two realizations I came to over after meditating on "my body longs for God" for just fifteen minutes.



Realization #1: "My body longs for God" can feel like a Great Calm. 
I have prayed "my body longs for you" many times, and most often I have thought of it as a longing for God that is like frantically searching for a lost wallet. Indeed, sometimes bodily longing for God has a sense of guttural desperation. But not today.

This morning "my body longs for you" didn't like desperation. Instead I unexpectedly drifted into a Great Calm. And I realized that being embraced by the Great Calm was not the opposite of longing for God. It was longing for God. And that's why I wanted to tell you about it. This is great news for those of us who deal with anxiety.

The Great Calm was something inside me and surrounding me at the same time. It felt like an embodied contentedness -- like sitting at the beach on a sunny day.

The Great Calm wasn't overpowering. It was more like a gentle invitation. I have come to recognize that God most often appears with a gentle invitation. (See Elijah on Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19.)

So, instead of predefining "my body longs for God" as a state of desperation and trying to produce that feeling, I simply and repeatedly prayed, "My body longs for you" and waited to see where that led for today. And God did lead me. He showed me that saying yes to the gentle invitation, saying yes to the Great Calm -- this is what "my body longs for you" can feel like.

The second realization: My body longs for God as a body that already has God. 
If you have ever run around looking for your lost wallet, you know there is a franticness to that search. It's because you don't have your wallet and want to make sure you can recover it. Longing for God isn't like that. It's more like knowing exactly where your wallet is and being comforted that you don't have to think about where your wallet is.

But the wallet analogy breaks down. God is far beyond any wallet. There is always more of God than we can take in. So with God, it's already having him, realizing how good he is, and longing to have more of him. "My body longs for you" doesn't mean pretending we don't have him at all and wanting to find him in the seat cushions of the couch. It's resting in God and being content in him -- and in that contentedness, feeling a burning inside that says, "This is good. I want more." That is living out the words, "My body longs for you."

Finally, bodily longing for God is foundational to human happiness.
There is abundant evidence to show that, especially in our anxiety-ridden culture, anything we can do to calm ourselves contributes to our overall happiness. And Jesus promised his disciples that they would enjoy a full and good life (John 10:10). Returning regularly to a place where we rest assured that God already has us and we already have God is a specific, concrete way to contribute to your overall wellbeing.

Recipe: 10 minutes of "my body longs for you"
So, here's what I would recommend as a prayer exercise.

Ingredients:

  • Timer set for 10 minutes (smartphones have apps for this)
  • Bible opened to Psalm 63
  • A comfortable and relatively quiet space
  • Your body (it's hard to go anyplace without it)
Steps:
  1. Settle into your space.
  2. Read Psalm 63:1-8. Then read it again.
  3. Focus specifically on these words: "my body longs for you." Repeat them at least three times.
  4. Start your timer.
  5. See what happens in your body as you pay attention to how it might long for God. If you get distracted (like I do), be gentle with yourself and return to the words, "My body longs for you."
  6. When you're finished, journal your experience. (Even if you didn't feel anything special, your body could still be longing for God just by breathing for 10 minutes.)
  7. Tell someone else what you have learned about your body longing for God.
  8. Repeat whenever you need some wellbeing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Why I have no hope of going to heaven

Image
I have little hope of going to heaven. In fact, I don't even want to go to heaven. Why? Because if we mean by "heaven" the final destination for God's people, then heaven isn't somewhere we go at all. Heaven isn't up in the sky. Heaven is here. When we say "heaven," most people think it's the place you go when you die. You are with God and his people, and you live forever in eternal bliss. The trouble is, that's a half-truth. It's not the biblical hope. Imagine it like this. Say you are living in a house that has been your beloved home for a long time, but it has fallen into disrepair. The plumbing is bad, the roof leaks and the house is infested with termites. You have painted the walls, and you even bought new kitchen appliances. You love the house, but it needs extensive work. Now through the generosity of a rich relative, you suddenly come into an inheritance huge enough that you can have your beloved house completely remod
Read more

Ten essential Dallas Willard quotes

Image
This week the church has lost a great saint and a shining light. Dallas Willard succumbed to cancer. As John Ortberg says in a wonderfully written tribute , Willard was brilliant, but "his heart and his life were better than his mind." I thought it would be appropriate to bring out ten quotes that do a pretty good job of getting at what Willard spent his life teaching and working on. 1. This quote states the central problem Willard spent his career working on: "My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance." (opening paragraph of  The Divine  Conspiracy ) 2. The central problem, restated: "The governing assumption today, among professing Christians, is that we can be 'Christians' forever and never become disciples." ( The Gre
Read more

Connecting with God when it feels like nothing special is happening

Image
I read recently that Facebook has been known to lead to depression. This person just enjoyed a vacation to Hawaii. That person's kids are cuter and apparently don't act up like yours. And that friend over there just won another award. If you're feeling sassy about your life, you join in on the bragging parade. If that little gray cloud is hovering over you reminding you of how things just aren't turning out, Facebook makes it worse. Today I decided to raise my fist in protest by writing a post about the morning my walk with God was less like leaping forward and more like shuffling along. It's like getting on Facebook and posting, "Nothing special happened in my world this morning. You feel me?" This morning I got up and made tea like usual. I sat in my chair like usual. I began my prayer time, like usual, with these words: "You were [God’s] enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself
Read more

A test of your relationship with God

Do you have the kind of relationship with God that is like a married couple, including fights and spats? That’s the biblical, Jewish picture of a person who really knows God.  At a certain point in life when I was dealing with some major disappointments, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to yell all my frustrations at God than go through a separation and live apart from him. That’s why I love this quote from Lois Tverberg and her quote of Peter Kreeft so much. Trust me, you’ll want to read to the bottom of this discussion of Job.  “Job’s friends were making the mistake that Western Christians do today when we don’t have a Hebraic understanding of the ‘knowledge of God’—da’at Elohim. A Westerner opens the Bible and wants to prove God’s existence and construct a theology to explain God’s nature. We would call that ‘knowledge of God.’ But in Hebrew, to ‘know’ someone was to be familiar with him through experience and relationship, as a wife knows her husband... “While Job’s
Read more

Sympathy for the mocking Roman soldiers

Image
Some time in the morning hours of Good Friday, Jesus was handed over to the Roman Praetorian guard before being led away to be crucified. It was a gruesome scene. Jesus had already been flogged within an inch of his life, and now the whole company of soldiers gathered around to mock and beat him. (Incidentally, historians report that this kind of treatment was not unique to Jesus. Others were mocked in similar ways.) The soldiers mocked Jesus for being a false -- and in their eyes, laughably pathetic -- king. Jesus stirred up this kind of trouble when he rode into town on Palm Sunday in a fashion that mimicked and symbolized both King Solomon and King David. New Testament scholar Craig Evans writes, Such an event suggested in unmistakable terms that Israel's king was Jesus, not Caesar. Thus, from the very moment of entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was set on a collision course with Roman authority. ( The Last Days of Jesus , p. 6)  Evans also points out that many of the soldiers&
Read more