The Press

Every January comes, beautiful as a new beginning and hopeful as a blank slate, and I find myself looking at my life and imagining its future.

With eleven unscripted months ahead of me, and (Lord willing) years of life yet to be lived, the opportunities and options seem boundless. How close can one heart grow to its Maker, and how alive can it become in the Word of God?

These are the questions that ruminate in me these days. I’m not hopelessly optimistic — I know my limitations, and my failures are ever before me. As a wife, mom, and woman in ministry I know the pinch of a shortage of time. I know the pain at the end of the day, wishing I had made different choices with my time. I daily feel the threats of the “lesser pleasures” that would distract me from simple devotion to Christ. But even these cannot dull the hope and longing to live bigger in love, give more and be abandoned at new levels THIS year.

Even beyond the narrow scope of a single year, how will I plan to give everything I am in pursuit of love in the next five years? Ten years? Thirty?

With seasons changing around me and time either alluding me or abounding depending on life’s circumstances, how will I live a life of extravagant devotion through it all? My simple, ambitious answer to these questions is what I call “The Press”.

The Press boils down to a heart posture in life. Posture is too stagnant a word: more like heart action.

The Press is a constant, continual, unending reach for God with as much time and energy as we have available. The details of life are unpredictable and oftentimes cannot be planned for. Life happens. In that, we are somewhat passive recipients. However, we have the ability, even responsibility to control the level of our pursuit of God in every season.

Maybe life is extraordinarily busy right now. Maybe projects at work have you up to your ears in to-do items and constant travel. Maybe there are children surrounding on every side, needs unending, time ever allusive for all that needs to be done.

Still, in the midst of the crazy swirl of activity, our hearts can press into His. We can seize even the lone minute to crack open the Word and read even just one verse. In those sixty seconds, it’s less about the verse being read (though there is much the Holy Spirit will breath into our spirits with one verse and one minute given in love). The gold found in pressing in to Him with the short moments is that the heart stays continually in a posture of reaching.

One day the business will run more smoothly, the babies will become pre-teens, and the minutes slowly turn into an available hour, which gives way into an afternoon, then days at a time open up.

It would be devastating to reach retirement, or the day the last child drives away for college, and realize we have hours to give, but a heart so dull we do not know where to even begin. The appetite for God left uncultivated slowly starves out to mere spiritual survival.

If we maintain The Press in our spirits, the minutes that give way to hours come as a joy. Our hearts can flourish and the adventure of drawing near to love that began so long ago with an offering of minutes can grow into a bonfire of a given life. Actually, I believe that through the years of pressing, a bonfire of love is what He sees all along.