Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I pondered them in my mind …

• Nehemiah 5:7a

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

• Luke 2:19

“Meditation means getting to the middle of a thing; not being like a pebble in a brook letting the water of thought go over us; that is reverie, not meditation. Meditation is an intense spiritual activity, it means bringing every bit of the mind into harness and concentrating its powers; it includes both deliberation and reflection. Deliberation means being able to weigh well what we think, conscious all the time that we are deliberating and meditating. ‘My heart consulted in me’ (Nehemiah 5:7, marg.)-that is exactly the meaning of meditation, also­ ‘But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2:19, RV marg.).”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (March 10, from Biblical Psychology)

Oswald Chambers makes a great point here regarding the efficacy of meditation, but we need to truly seek God.  We need to block out distractions.  And we need to block out enough time.

The church where I attend now had two 24-hour prayer vigils within the first five years of my wife and I attending that church.  The first was over a money issue and we got a lot of people to pray.  The second was over a spiritual issue and very few volunteers came out.  To have the church prayer “closet” manned for the entire 24-hours, the couple who set up the prayer vigil split all the graveyard hours, from 10:00pm until 7:00am.  They prayed for two-hour blocks and then woke up their spouse.

My wife and I had a single two-hour block.  Basically, we had the early part of primetime, thinking that people might not want to miss their favorite television show.  This was long before my wife’s medical issues limited her stamina.

She went first and then she went to the youth lounge where she could read the Bible or take a nap.

I read the information about what we were praying about, although I already knew that.  I went through the church’s prayer list, a couple of times.  I went through the list of prayer requests that my wife and I had prepared.  And then, I checked my watch, and twenty minutes had been spent.

Then, I started singing hymns.  I had tried listening to the music that the organizers had put on a CD player, but it was modern worship music.  It was good music, but it distracted me more than focusing my thoughts on the issue at hand.  Maybe I sang the first verse or two of a few hymns.  Now, I had half the time that I was allotted, and I had nothing else to say.

Then I desperately cried out, the only one on that floor of the building, “God, I have nothing else to request.  I have nothing else I can think of.  I have even prayed for relatives that my wife and I failed to put on the personal prayer items.”

And then as I stared at the table at the front of the sanctuary I stared at the two lit candles.  I was suddenly somewhere else in my mind.  Was it a vision or a dream?  But God had my mind focused on the task at hand and I saw the images of why we were so concerned about this particular issue.

The next moment that I had a conscious thought, the prayer vigil organizer tapped me on the shoulder.  I jumped out of my skin.  I had been in that other place, and now I was back in the here and now. The organizer said that I could go get my wife from the youth lounge downstairs and go home.  He had wanted to relieve me five minutes earlier, but it seemed like I was so into the praying that I did not want to stop, but my wife really wanted to get home.

Yes, God can penetrate our heart and get us in that position of deep meditation, but it might just take a long time to get rid of those distractions so that God does the talking, and we simply listen and learn.  And when that happens, the time flies by.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.