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Meditations of the Heart

 May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)

          As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation, I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts; our wills.

          While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointment, as we discover another reality, that we not only can’t do it all, but we don’t have what it takes to do most of it. In addition, we discover that we don’t really want to do some of them.

          The guidance of the meditation of our hearts is both simpler and more difficult than the guidance of the meditation of our minds. It’s simpler because it’s not all over the place. It’s more difficult because it pits our will against our will. Prayer and recruiting our minds to step in and both argue and distract the will in a better direction is more effective. 

          But the start is with this prayer, and with a choice to pay attention to our choices. John Ortberg talks about rumination fairly frequently. It’s another word for the meditations of our hearts. What are the things we keep coming back to? Is it a hatred? A hurt? A desire to help? A person we care about? And, if that thing we keep chewing on isn’t something that would please God, what can we do to notice when it returns and show it the door? Saying “I won’t think about _____” won’t help because thinking about not thinking about it is thinking about it. It's like a tune you can't get out of your head. To what else will you turn your attention?

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