That’s right. I walked right to that office – that’s what I did – and I reached across that desk and I grabbed him by his big fat head and I said “Listen, man. I’m not going to jail for you or for anybody. -Garth Algar*
You are forgiven if you’ve never seen Wayne’s World. In the sixth grade I watched it every day after school, so I can still picture Dana Carvery as Garth Algar pretending to be a big bad tough guy who put his crooked lawyer in his place.
Garth is doing what all of us have done. We’ve had imaginary conversations in our head where we are tougher, wittier, and more compelling than we are in real life. We’ve rolled the scene over in our minds hundreds of times, each time crafting it a bit to chisel out the image of ourselves we want to project.
In those moments what we are doing is meditating. And so I find it strange that as Christians the concept of meditation seems a bit foreign to us—or at least something that only hippies like the Beatles are supposed to practice. But biblical meditation is something that can transform our lives. And its not something that is all that foreign to us.
This is what Edmund Calamy meant when he said,
How often have you have chewed the devil’s cud; what swarms of unclean thoughts, of proud thoughts, of unbelieving thoughts, have possessed your hearts? Oh friends, shall we lie musing upon our bed in a way of sin, and shall we not think and muse and meditate on God and the things of God? (Quoted from God’s Battle Plan for the Mind)
You and I know how to meditate. We do it all the time. The problem is few of us know how to meditate on God’s Word. We’ve gotten so much practice in ruminating on the thoughts of the world that we’ve grown ill-acquainted with giving our minds to the things of God.
I’m dedicating a bit of time in this season to recover and maybe even learn the practice of biblical meditation. One resource I’m using is God’s Battle Plan for the Mind by David Saxon. The Puritans got this—perhaps this is why they are such deep wells of gospel truths—and Saxon helps us to understand their practice.
We all meditate…let’s pursue meditating on the right things.
