Centering Prayer & Meditation

November 18, 2010

Are you awake?

This meditation is excerpted from the book “Present Perfect: Finding God in the Now,” by Gregory A. Boyd.

Chasing the Sun

We are all dying. Each day, each moment, our bodies decay a little more. When we are young, we think we have all the time in the world. We can be whatever we want to be. We can cook up grand schemes for what we’ll do sometime during our lifetime. But as we get older and older, some of those things are not possible for us anymore. We have responsibilities, maybe even infirmities, which prevent us from doing some of the things we want to do.  And we fear that we’ll never really live our lives to the fullest before we pass from this earth.

But in 2 Corinthians 5: 17 we are told of God’s promise that we will not be defeated by death:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

Boyd says “…we experience fear and dread over the decay of our body and our impending death only because we are in fact viewing our present preciously short life as though it were our total life…When God’s love becomes our sole source of Life moment-by-moment, we will have no regrets about the past and no fears about the future, for we are fulfilled and are trusting God in the present.”

If we live each moment aware of God’s presence, then we are released from all that anxiety! 


Furthermore, we’ll find we have different motivations for what we do. We no longer are working to stave off death. Instead we are working to express the fullness of the Life we already have. We’ll tend to be more successful this way, too.

Boyd suggests the “palms down, palms up” method of prayer to help us cultivate a habit of letting go of things that keep us mired in the past or anxious for the future.

Now we are going to try an exercise to help us to realize that we are situated in the middle of a vast universe…infinitely larger than we are, and infinitely smaller than we are.

Sit in a comfortable place and just try to be aware of how vast the universe is…how you are just a speck in the cosmos. And then at the same time, think about how large you are in comparison to the other things. Think about how God is present as far out as we can think, and as far IN as we can think. Out to the largest possible scenario and in to the smallest possible particle…God is present.

Boyd ends the chapter with this: “Though we are microscopic in size next to the vastness of the universe, the Creator loves each of us as if we were the only being he created. For a God of unlimited love, size does not matter.”