Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in GodSample

The Art of Beholding

Sometimes “prayer” feels limiting because often when we use that word, we’re thinking about techniques or continuous conscious mental dialogue.

But beholding is deeper.

Beholding is about how we hold God before us and how we live from the place of being held by Him. It’s the practice of looking to God with an open soul, admiring Him, allowing Him to be, and watching Him move in and around our lives. It’s a much wider definition than speaking to God to get things done, offering words of praise, or interceding on behalf of others. It’s about how we exist.

In a way, beholding is praying without ceasing, but it’s also more than that. It’s about spending our lives admiring the beauty of God, without agenda. To be with God in this way, without special outcomes or objectives, is to love Him for Him alone. It’s our response to the Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:36-37).

Like Elijah in the wilderness in 1 Kings 19, when the thunder, wind, and fires of the world and of our lives rage, we’re invited to retreat into the still, small whisper; a whisper that draws us into quiet simplicity rather than competing ambition, and leads us to the discovery of a patient God, who in His gentleness can and will transform us.

The invitation here is to simple friendship. It is to see prayer as a satisfying and abiding pleasure. It is to remap our expectations about where our strength comes from, to exhale into the unburdening God and to inhale His beauty and life.

In the midst of our present global confusion, there is a Presence engulfing enough to sweep up the inner pain we face and give hope in times of despair. There is a Comfort for the disoriented and those who search for meaning, and there is a Way that leads to life in all its fullness.

It’s not a new way; it’s an ancient one. It’s the way of love, adoration, and devotion. It is the way, the art, of beholding. And only God can lead us there.

Come, Holy Spirit,

And show us our Father,

Our life source, our longing,

Our home.

This plan is presented to you by Beholding by Strahan Coleman. To learn more about this book, click here.