Too often our minds get trapped living merely in the horizontal realities of life where we’re focused on our circumstances, jobs, people’s approval, chronic pain, and life’s uncertainties. And we forget the vertical realities of God’s presence and loving care and control over our circumstances and our future. In this meditation you’ll be using your biblically guided imagination to see your life and your body with these vertical realities so you can experience God’s presence and promises to you in a way that replaces stress, tension, and anxiety with a calm and confidence of God’s peace and joy and assurances. This kind of meditation/contemplation is something God’s people have been doing for thousands of years. It brings transformation by recalibrating your whole self, including your body, with the life-giving, rejuvenating inner presence of God’s Spirit. Let’s take time to do that now. But first, if your podcast app is set to skip silent sections, disable that now. Let’s begin by putting your mind and body in a disposition to be able to listen to and feel the life-giving, rejuvenating inner presence of God’s Spirit in meditation. Lie flat on your back …or sit comfortably in a chair. You might want to close your eyes so you can focus your mind better. Try to be in a place without a lot of lights and loud sounds. But wherever you are right now, just make the best of it and you can benefit from this time of meditation. Begin by taking in deep, slow breaths through your nose. Bring your mind’s awareness on feeling the fresh air coming in through your nose. And as you exhale, try to relax your body a little bit more with each breath. Sometimes it helps to Imagine your body relaxing with each exhale like slowly letting the air out of an air mattress a little more with each breath. Feel your body getting more relaxed as you let out each breath. Each slow, deep breath. Focus your mind’s awareness on feeling your whole body becoming more relaxed. It’s important to use meditation to bring your mind and body back into a oneness where you embrace your whole body as an important part of who you are eternally. That’s why you will have a bodily resurrection in your eternal salvation. Not a new body, but a transformed body without decay or sin or mortality. When you embrace your body as part of who you are, you are able to live as God intends. And you’re able to present your entire self, including the members of your body, to God’s Spirit. Focusing on breathing and relaxing the entirety of your body in meditation helps you reconnect your mind with your body. If there is a part of your body that can’t relax, that’s OK. For now, just focus on the other parts of your body than can and ignore the parts that can’t. Take some time now to bring your mind’s awareness on relaxing your whole body with each breath. Sometimes it helps to have a home base for relaxing your body. For me it’s the back of my head, down my neck to the ball at the base of my shoulders and neck, and out to the rest of my shoulders. I focus on relaxing that first and keeping that part relaxed as I then focus on the rest of my body. Maybe for you it’s another place: your gut and diaphragm. Or your eyes, cheeks, and forehead. For some it’s their feet. Try different places and see where it feels like a kind of home base for feeling relaxed. Let’s meditate on Jesus’s words in… John 7:37-39 (ESV) …“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. The apostle John whispers to his readers and says that Jesus was talking about the Spirit that those who believe him will receive. This is how Jesus inhabits our lives — by his Holy Spirit....