“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“I’m gonna think about that.”

“Ever since you mentioned that, I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Remember how we were talking about that situation? I started wondering what would happen if we tried this.”

“I was sitting in that seminar and all of the sudden, something clicked. So I’ve been working through my schedule using the principles, and, well, I’ve made some changes.”

Sound familiar? Those are phrases we use when we’ve taken some words and wrestled with them.

Those are phrases that capture what God meant when he said to Joshua,

Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

We read “meditate” and we think “silence” and we think “empty” and we think “how in the world am I going to sit around all day and do nothing but think about Bible verses?”

But that isn’t what Joshua did.

Right before God says this to Joshua, he says “get ready to cross the Jordan River.” Right after this, Joshua goes to the officers of the people and says, “go tell them to get ready to cross the Jordan River.”

Joshua lived an active life, leading a huge group of people in a major settlement project. He wasn’t sitting silently all day.

However, he was thinking about what he read, what he may have watched Moses write. He was wrestling with what God said and then looking for ways to apply it, to carry it out.

The invitation to us to meditate on God’s words, repeated in Psalm 1 and throughout Psalms, is to think them through, to understand the story, ask what they mean.

Constantly.

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For more on reading reflectively, see “The Heart of Lectio Divina”

For more on where to start reading, see “Just dive in.”