My Wife and Meditation
My wife and meditation: My wife loves flowers. She is a beautiful woman inside and out and deserves flowers. Recently, I was driving home and began to think about her. I thought about how she has suffered and overcome. I was musing on her ability to stick with me when deeply fettered with illness, sin, and selfishness. As I pondered her face and her virtue in my mind, I was moved to feelings of admiration and love. I decided it was time for flowers again.
It occurred to me that this is a perfect illustration of affective mediation as it plays out in our love relationship with God. When we meditate, we ruminate on the goodness of God and how He has sustained us and continued to love us even as we reject Him in so many ways. As we ponder His goodness, kindness, gentleness, and perseverance, our will becomes inflamed. When our will is rightly inflamed to love, we act in service to him.
True meditation always results in living out the love that is inflamed in our hearts.