Meditation - Why You Need to Be Like a Cow!

Photo by Hugo L. Casanova on Unsplash

Why does this “revelation” we talked about last time happen at night? You know, getting those thoughts in the night you never thought of the night before when you started meditating? Because He who keeps you does not slumber nor sleep, so I reckon He is able to massage some sweet nothings into your spirit at night too!

Looking at what the Bible says, in Proverbs 6, there is a cool verse tucked into a passage about a father and a mother’s commands, but the context is “the commandment” and “the law” (which obediently the parents are here obviously passing on to their children, as would be the Jewish tradition). In other words we’re talking about the effect of the Word of God here in Proverbs vi 22:

When you roam, it will lead you;
When you sleep, it will keep you;
And when you awake, it will speak with you.

Isn’t that cool? Here we have one verse (among many) talking about what meditation does for you while you're sleeping! And what does it say happens when you wake up? Wow! Don’t you want that every morning? I know I do.

Are you getting how powerful this is? With a disciplined ritual formed in your life of reading the Bible in the morning, you can literally be thinking about a verse or passage all day and all night (even while you work and sleep)!

It’s like a cow chewing the cud. You know that a cow has one stomach with four compartments. When the cow gets in among the grassy fields, it chows down a load of Scripture (sorry! I mean, grass), and this strong mass of assorted foods goes into its first stomach compartment. Then, when she is full and resting, she burps up some grass (the cud) and chews on that for a while. All the juices from that cud are then passed to her remaining two “stomachs” (the omasum and the abomasum), where it is all nicely digested into the blood stream, the udder (for milk) and for the cow’s general wellbeing.

How about us? We’re ploughing through our morning Bible reading before heading out to work. Perhaps you only have a few minutes awake enough to grab some passage or verses from the Bible. Anyway, this way we get all sorts of content. Some of it’s hard to understand. Some of it seems to be speaking to you. Some of it requires further study or thought, or you just forget mosts of it.

Here’s the good news! You are probably one step away from developing an amazing life of meditation, if you have grazed a little in the Word already at the start of each day.

Now, all you need to do, is keep that radio off on your morning commute (or for part of it!), or, while you’re eating breakfast, you grab a verse you want to explore, or you prayerfully involve the Holy Spirit in a conversation about that verse you don’t understand while showering, etc.

You have started to meditate by day! Do this at a regular time, like every time you get in your car, or on your bike, or walk the dog, and you will soon have an automatic meditation habit formed in your life.

Do you want to benefit from what you eat spiritually? Then be like a cow, and get all the good juices out of the passages you read by burping them up at restful or waiting moments throughout the day, and do it again last thing at night before you sleep, and, before you know it, you will strengthen your spiritual body in ways unparalleled so far in your walk with God!

Next time we’ll look at another way to meditate in the Word. I just want you to have time to practice rolling those dice a little bit more for a couple of days! 😃