Put Down Your Phone, Write Out a Psalmනියැදිය

How to meditate and pray like David

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been both challenged and encouraged as I’ve slowed down to spend time in Psalm 119 by what prayer and a life with God are really like. David demonstrates for us what a relationship with God is.

It’s intimate, personal.

It’s a negotiation.

Prayer is an ongoing conversation, often internal.

It’s not always formal, but there’s some ceremony and flourish.

It’s a fight, sometimes, to believe.

The constant declarations of basic, inherent truths—the announcements of God’s eternal qualities—bring lens-focusing clarity on the reality of God’s character to build up faith, like an optometrist brings everything into focus for someone with blurry-eyed vision.

The relationship with God is honest. It acknowledges all the things: the faith and the failings, the desires and the frustrations, the red-hot anger, suffocating fears, and the unspeakable passions, too.

Take a moment to read the passage from verses 156 - 175, for example. This is a total barrage of desperate appeal, flattery, stress, sober self-judgment, pleas and bargaining.

Walking with God is bringing your whole self before him. To seek and find wholeness and peace.

Then, suddenly, it ends

As we close out these reflections on Psalm 119, it’s cool to realize that the very practice of waking early with coffee to read the passages, pulling out a pen and writing the words down, has been a form of meditation. Writing out David's meditations and revisiting the words right here on the Bible App in the last watch of the night is a modern digital meditation.

Then it suddenly ends. The Psalm, that is.

“I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek out your servant,” David admits as he closes this long verse (Psalm 119:176, NRSV). Here we have Luke’s gospel message before Christ is ever born. After all the pleas, reflection, truth-telling, meditation, David simply needs a rescuer and saviour able to find, help, protect, and locate him in all the darkness and danger of life.

A lost sheep that remembers God’s word.

As we zoom out and think about my takeaways from transcribing this Psalm, the incredible sweetness of the private, personal relationship to God stands out. David’s private prayer life and public writings show us what his way with God looks like.

But it’s his way. On display to encourage us. And it does encourage me. Our adult selves try to control and shape the wet slab of clay that is our life to make sense and form it (as we well should).

This Psalm helps to remind us that the main thing we can shape is our self. That’s what we have. Our personhood.

We have public personas and have to show up in the world with all its systems and expectations. But there’s an untouchable, un-sharable part of ourselves that only God can know, and only we can experience with him. What that thing is like bubbles up in our lives—the choices we make, the communities we show up in, the friends we have, the things we say out loud and write down, the decisions we make.

What an incredible mystery to consider and to live out, day after day. Live, friends. And as you do, be yourself. Especially with God.

Amen.

Action steps

• Take time to write out Psalm 119: 149 - 176 verse by verse.
• Get a journal or some paper and a pen.
• Put your phone in a drawer or another room.
• Get a physical Bible (so you won't get distracted by anything else).
• Reflect on what God is highlighting as you write it out.