Bow Your Heads, Close Your Eyes (Friday Devotional)

 

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." 

- Psalm 46:10

When teaching children how to pray, there are usually three instructions I give: Put your hands together, bow your head, and close your eyes. Before we ever get into “Dear God,” before I ever explain the different kinds of prayer, and long before the final “amen,” we start with that simple posture: put your hands together, bow your head, and close your eyes.

But have you ever wondered why we do those things when we pray? Why is that posture—one never explicitly demanded by Scripture—so automatic for believers around the world and throughout the ages?

I think it comes down to one word: still. When you clasp your hands together, you render them incapable of doing anything else—they can’t make anything or break anything, they can’t move at all. When you bow your head, you fix your gaze in one direction, limiting the scope of what you can see. And when you close your eyes, you block out your vision altogether, shutting out the world around you. For the time you are praying, you cease moving and observing. You’re simply still.

In our overstimulated world, there is something powerfully humble about making yourself still for the sake of prayer. Ours is a society where focus is fragmented, where we are bombarded by ceaseless alerts and notifications, where taking a 5-minute bathroom break without your phone in hand is borderline incomprehensible. We live in a state of constant distraction.

But when you pray, you declare that time with God is worthy of your focus. When you bow your head and close your eyes, you choose to shut out the noise. You are still.

So let me encourage you now, whether you are reading this on your phone while waiting in line, on your desktop computer in between tasks, or on your iPad while you bounce between emails and social media—stop what you’re doing for a couple minutes. Turn it all off and set it to the side. Just for a few minutes, be still and know that the Lord is God. Listen to what God has to tell you when you pray—because when you don’t move and you can’t see, you’ll be amazed by what you hear.