All squeezed out

Do you ever feel like a lemon that has been squeezed and squeezed and there is nothing left, totally empty? This is a feeling that happens to us sometime in life. There can be a variety of causes, and we could debate those in another blog, but what can we do to get our juice back and refreshment so we can go back into the world. Specifically, how does the Bible, God's word play a role in this?

I want to share one specific thing a friend taught me many years ago that helps me in these times. Its something that I try to do every few weeks and it has a profound effect on my life. I go to the book of Psalms (Psalmid-laulud) and I pray through a psalm. I don't really have a system for picking them, but I take the psalm and I read it verse by verse and then I personalize the thoughts of the reader and apply them to my life. Sometimes its about how a personal is responding to God, or about his word, but I take the words and I then pray them out. If the text talks about longing for God, I restate it in my own language and the elaborate it, responding to it and sharing my life with God. This is helpful because when those moments when we feel empty its hard to even think or string thoughts together, but this gives me Gods words and then I respond. I try to spend a few minutes on each verse, this can vary, if you pick a long psalm like 119, then you have to clear out your schedule cause it can take a while. Sometimes I move on and pray another psalm. One other benefit of this is I feel a kindred spirit with the writer and I take time to think about what they were going through when they wrote this psalm, where did they write it and all that fun stuff. Praying through a psalm, has been a powerful part of my life for about 10 years and I hope to continue it for the rest of my life.

When your feeling squeezed and have nothing to say, but a desire to go to God and his Word, pick out a psalm, pray through it and then let God and his word fill you back up.