If you are like me, growing up in a Southern Baptist heritage,
meditation was not one the top five disciplines discussed. We left
that to the Quakers and Shakers.
Today, Peterson offered up a better understanding of "meditation." He
says, "Meditation is the aspect of spiritual reading that trains us to
read Scripture as a connected, coherent whole, not a collection of
inspired bits and pieces." p. 100
This is interesting to me because I have one of those pocket promises
books that break apart the Story into small manageable pieces that I
can pull out to "minister" to my Holy Wants, my Holy Needs and my Holy
Feelings.
I started reading Prince Caspian to Garin a couple nights ago. How
cheap would it be for me to only pull out sentences and give them to
her with no regard to the context...no regard to the story. That would
suck!
But we choose to read the bible this way? Meditation helps us recover
the context of the bible in story and it invites us into the Story
much like Garin is drawn into Prince Caspian.
Came from my iPhone.
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3 comments:
Interesting- I was researching the Qiakers last night and got stuck on just that one thing. Everything else seems to be great, except this meditation and internal light. So am I missing the point, and simply glossing over it? What more should I be thinking about? Or is that the point- that in my hurry I'm glossing over the Bible as a story, and choosing to read it as Canterbury Tales, holding each story up for comparison to the others, instead of focusing on the journey the pilgrims were on while they told those stories? I'm thinking I need to read this book- but maybe your blog will save me the time and I can focus on reading the Bible. Ha- irony.
Excuse my fat fingers- QUAKERS
what I am learning right now is that I have two things to focus on: first I want to stop readingthe bible in soundbites. This often happens when I use devotional guides - they give me a verse and then some sort of inspirational thought for the day so I can "apply that verse" to my day. What I am sensing is a greater call to read the larger story and discover how I can apply my life to that story. Can you feel the difference?
Second, I want to invest in the chronological flow of the Great Story. Can you imagine the confusion our kids would have if we read their stories out of chronological-order. There are some great helps in this area and I'll try to post some of those soon.
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