Sunday: Prayer & Worship
September 28
- Scripture: Psalm 95:1-2 — “Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.”
- Reflection: Dedicating time to welcome and seek God’s presence becomes a connective experience. It can happen in a formal time and place with a faith community. Or in a sacred space that is natural or manmade, with your chosen companions. Or even in solitude.
Worship can involve silence, or words, or music. It can be experienced through stillness or movement. It can include reading the written word, engaging the ‘text of creation’ (the natural world), or finding revelation through creative and expressive arts such as theater, fine art, performance or literature. Worship might be inwardly-focused. Or might involve response to, and engagement with, external stimuli. Depending on which sensory and intellectual and emotional paths are most open to you, God may make Godself known to you in various ways.
Worship may occur as an intimate and comforting experience. Or may take place in a way that demands your awe, and creates a sense of dramatic difference in scale, between one’s own life and the vastness of what is enduring and eternal.
What prompts awe in you? What draws out praise from you?
Often such encounters become a glimpse of Holy Love. Maybe it’s being with something immeasurable, such as the night stars and constellations spilling across the deep sky, the expanse of the sea from one horizon to another, the dazzle of light through ice crystals on a bluebird winter day, clouds pouring over a cascade of blue-and-purple summits, the spiral of branches emerging from tree trunk as it rises earth to heaven. Maybe it’s those memorable encounters with living creatures, such as whales blowing and breaching the ocean’s surface, the wheel of birds in the sky overhead, the leap and fall of a dancer, the soar of a singer’s voice, the feel of a small child nestled in your arms, or the softness of a pet’s silky coat beneath your hand. - Aren’t you moved to tears and laughter, as if you teeter on the precipice of life-altering experience and awareness, at such times? Don’t you wish you could hold and keep the moment? Don’t you find yourself almost beyond words, yet wanting to say … something?
How can you describe it? Thanks? Amazement? Ineffable joy? - Spiritual Practice: Make your day an invitation to connect. Ask for the presence of holy love. Be attentive to it. Take note of how you become of aware ways that sacred presence becomes manifest for you.
Song:
- Yahweh / The Great I Am: https://youtu.be/17_HP8Mdeig?si=1ua8BMwS8kLamOBV
To worship is to praise the worth of God—the power, the love, the holiness, and the majesty. — Richard Foster
Sept 28 Daily Devotional