For my devotions on Monday, I read Psalm 1, and verse 2 hit me like a semi-truck: “[Blessed is the man] whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.”
First, it would be an exaggeration to say I delight in God’s law. I delight in chocolate and NBA playoff basketball and a good book and playing music with my brother and going on walks with wife and daughter. I read my Bible every day, but do I delight in God’s law? Not so much.
Second, if you asked me at any given moment what I was thinking about, the answer would be food 80% of the time. So I’m falling short on the whole day/night meditating on God’s law thing too.
Suitably convicted, I decided to do two things: pray every day that I would begin to delight in God’s word, and try to keep one verse from my devotional reading in my mind each day as something to come back to.
This week, God, in His infinite wisdom, decided to show me first-hand what constant meditation looks like, and how I am (for now) doing it wrong.
My wife fantasizes about us moving to the upstate so that we can be closer her parents and brother’s family. The only way that would happen, of course, is if we were to get gigs at different colleges. The market for English profs is pretty awful, so this would not be easy. On the plus-side, there are two Southern Baptist affiliated schools like CSU in the upstate: Anderson and North Greenville. For whatever reason on Monday, evening I decided to check their employment listings, and, wouldn’t you know it, North Greenville had a position open.
Now, I had no idea when the job had been posted. I couldn’t find details about it anywhere else on the web. The post didn’t specify the specialization they wanted (would my specialty, Renaissance Lit, be okay, or were they looking for someone who taught American literature?), and there was definitely nothing about salary. Finally, the position was for an assistant professor, and I got promoted to associate this past year.
But there it was: an open job in the upstate.
I asked my wife about applying, which would require no little amount of effort: I needed a job letter, an academic résumé, a faith integration statement, transcripts from every secondary school I’ve attended, and three letters of recommendation. My mind was racing, but she said I should check it out.
Monday evening, I sent the department chair at NGU an e-mail basically asking if it was worth it to apply. That night, I prayed with Britt about the opportunity. I asked God to make my path clear. If this was a legitimate opening, I prayed for an excited response from the department chair. If it was a closed door, I asked for me to know that quickly so that I wasn’t wondering all summer what I should do.
It was good to pray, but it didn’t mean that my spirit was settled. I started writing my job letter, just in case. I thought about who I would ask to recommend me. I started thinking about where we might live in Greenville. And most of all, I kept checking my e-mail. For the next 24 hours, I checked my account no less than 25,670 times. Where was the response?
The next night at around 7pm, I did get a response. It was two sentences long: “Thanks for your inquiry. The position has been filled.”
That’s it. The door was closed. My prayer had been answered. But I was still a bit discombobulated. The possibility of the application had turned something on inside me that was difficult to turn off with a simple rejection.
And then it hit me. THIS is what constant meditation looks like. What I had just done for the past 24 hours was constantly meditate on my job prospects and what I would have to do should this job be open and what would have to happen should I get the job. It was (almost) all I thought about.
It’s not right, but that’s where I was.
And as I thought back on Psalm 1:2, I realized that this is what it would look like to meditate on God’s law. It would look like me checking a verse of encouragement 25,670 times a day instead of my inbox. It would mean that my mind’s screensaver would be set on God, so that, when I wasn’t doing anything, my mind instinctively went to God.
This is a hard thing to contemplate much less do.
So I added another prayer to my list.
“God, let me delight in your word, and let me think about your word habitually.”