Always Growing: Practices for Spiritual Growth
A couple of winters ago, I wrote an article about the concept of “drawing near” to God.
I was first introduced to the language of drawing near when I studied the Song of Songs for my book and study, Altogether Beautiful. There are 43 direct invitations to deeper relationship with God using the phrase “draw near” in the ESV translation of the Bible. Wow! That doesn’t include the less literal version of the invitation we find in the Song of Songs itself:
Draw me after you; let us run. The king has brought me into his chambers.
Song of Songs 1:4
One thing this invitation of draw near brings into our lives is the reminder of our place before God as beloved, nothing more and nothing less. God enjoys the process of our lives, the whole journey. He isn’t looking for our success or what we offer Him. He’s looking for us. Just us.
The Spiritual Practice of Drawing Near will bring growth into our lives - for our spiritual health, also for our mental and emotional health. Simply being with God is a form of mindfulness that engages our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength rather than leaving God in our thoughts or (worse) in the physical places we worship.
You can find the article about Drawing Near at the link below, and then listen in to the podcast for four spiritual practices for drawing near. You can find them at the links below, which will be added as the episodes drop over the next two months. You can also subscribe to the Life in Relationship podcast wherever you get your podcasts to grab the episodes as they come out.
Drawing Near doesn’t have to be complicated and it doesn’t have to take up our whole day, although it can. And wouldn’t it be awesome to have the sense that God is near just bleed into all of your day, all of your life, rather than the sense that He is far off or uninterested or maybe busy with other more important things?
Drawing Near Truth: God doesn’t believe in “more important things.” He believes in relationship. He believes in Love. He believes in Hope and in the power of Jesus’s presence. He believes in His utter inability to be unfaithful to us. When we take a moment to be with all of that, to be woahed and awed by those qualities of God, there is growth.
Drawing Near is for you and for me. It’s for our spiritual health and also for our whole selves. Draw near to God, draw near to awe, draw near to grace, draw near to growth.
We are always. always growing.