Facedown Living

Today I am doing nothing in particular.

I am reading and knitting and pulling my babies close to me to snuggle them before we all take naps. I am savoring the sounds of God's people worshiping on my laptop. I am writing letters and having a second cup of coffee and saying yes! when the kids ask to go outside in the beautiful Spring weather to play.

And I am pondering how to live a facedown kind of life.

I started a thread on my Facebook page, wanting to get feedback about what the difference is between praise and worship. Because they always seem to go together, don't they? And yet they are different, no matter how subtly.

I'm still investigating.

I am a word-nerd, so I am sure at some point I will break down and get my worn Strong's concordance down from my bookshelf, smell the old as I flip through it's pages, and look for these words in the Greek and Hebrew. But if I were to sum up what is swirling around in my heart right now, it would be this:

Praise is bragging on God. It's telling others how completely freaking amazing He is. And worship? Well, that's when we go right *to* God, and we are wonderstruck and awe-inspired and crazy in love, and that's when we fall facedown with all our hearts, in response to who He is.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

There's this old song by Keith Green, who my husband looks perhaps a little too much like, that is called Make My Life A Prayer To You. I'm meditating on that today, and on Romans 12 where it says our very bodies are supposed to be living sacrifices. This life I'm living is meant to be worship to God. It is humbling to imagine that it makes a difference in this frail frame what I do, that my devotion to and communion with God are meant to shape me, to renew me, to transform me.

And so I pause to remember these things as the kids get noisy and bicker, as I write a letter to my cousin in jail awaiting trial, as I rinse out my coffee cup. I imagine my spirit facedown as I respond to a text message, as I eat a granola bar, as I squeeze lemon into my ice water. I adore Him as I contemplate what to fix for dinner, as I tidy my room, as I toss a load of sheets into the washing machine.

Perhaps the beauty in all of this is that praise and worship seem to kiss, they mingle and morph into one life-filled response.

True worship, genuine praise, can never be divorced from heart change. It is not simply with our mouths, it is with our entire beings. It is for God, with God, in God.

In Him we live and move and have our very beings.