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Drawing Near to God with the Heart: Praying the Psalms

Lynne Baab • Friday February 17 2017

Throughout the ages, the psalms have been the prayer book of the Bible, used by Jews and Christians for individual prayer and for prayer in congregations. As we learn to face with increased honestly the wide variety of emotions inside us, praying the psalms can be both comforting and challenging. During my years of psalm reading, described in last week’s post, I often found that my reading turned into prayer, and I came to love the psalms as prayers. They voice for me so many parts of myself, and they bring those aspects of my personality and emotions into God’s presence...

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Drawing Near to God with the Heart: A journey with the Psalms

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 9 2017

Soon after my fortieth birthday, I found I couldn’t read the Bible. All the ethical and theological truths of the Bible, which I had been studying consistently for the twenty years I had been a Christian, seemed dry and lifeless. It was as if my soul couldn’t bear to take in one more piece of truth. It seemed as though my soul was longing for something to touch my whole being, not just my mind.

As I look back, I can see that it wasn’t really a time of spiritual dryness; it was more a time to integrate what I already knew...

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Drawing Near to God with the Heart: God Woos Us

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 2 2017

Brent Curtis and John Eldredge wrote a fascinating book that develops the idea that God calls us to draw near to him with our hearts. The book’s title, The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God, expresses their conviction that God tenderly woos us and romances us. They believe that if we are not responding to God with our hearts, we are missing something central to the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished – a life without heart is not worth living. For out of this...

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Drawing Near to God with the Heart: first post of a series

Lynne Baab • Thursday January 26 2017

In the interviews for my two midlife books [1], I heard from many people about a desire to integrate all the parts of our lives into one whole. As we look back on our lives, we can see diverse threads, some of them meaningful and some of them trivial and inconsequential. Some of the aspects of our work, some of the things we do for recreation, some of the people we spend time with, and some of the habits we have clung to for years seem ridiculously meaningless. We wonder why we have continued to do them. But mixed in with...

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