“Today, LORD, I want to live in and through and for you.  Help me to live with the prepositions in the right order.”

I tend to think (and even feel) grammatically.  That doesn’t mean that my grammar is always good or appropriate.

Take prepositions, for example.

Prepositions are the workhorses of every language I know anything about.  Along with conjunctions, they connect and divide.  They prioritize.  They are, I would argue, the most important parts of speech and thinking—more important than nouns, or even verbs.  Prepositions are the unsung heroes of language.

“She gave her love to me,” versus “She took her love from me”—that sort of thing.  “I ran toward the dog,” is a very different statement from “I ran from the dog.”

So, this morning, I wrote in my journal the words that begin this post: “Today, LORD, I want to live in and through and for you.  Help me to live with the prepositions in the right order.”

The prepositions are crucial in this desperately longing short prayer.

First, I need to live in God.  Indeed, I believe that there is nowhere else to live.

The Apostle Paul, speaking to some of the intellectuals of first-century Athens, said, “For in him (that is, God) we live and move have our being” (Acts 17:28).

We live in God!  Does that seem a bit “new-age-ish” to you?  Well, it’s in the Bible!

Of course, if we live in God, that means it is going to be terrible difficult to recognize God’s presence, or even God’s existence.  If God is the medium in which we live, we will probably take God for granted.  Expecting us to be aware of God would be like expecting a fish to be aware of water.  Water is all that the fish knows.  Therefore, awareness of water is, I suspect, not easy for fish.

And yet, though living in God makes it very challenging even to be aware of God, it is a wonderful prepositional truth.  (No, I did not mean “propositional truth.”  I meant “prepositional truth!”)  There is a sense in which I need to “seek” God.  There is another sense in which I simply need to pay attention.  God is, in fact, all around me, inescapably present.  This non-negotiable presence of God might invite me not to take myself quite so seriously.  It might help me to relax.

But even when something or Someone is inescapably present, I do need to pay attention to that fact.  Unfortunately, paying attention is not one of my strong suits.

Then, there is the preposition “through.”  “Through” means that I don’t try to do life apart from God.  Living through God means that I recognize my intense need for God’s help in order to live well.  Otherwise, I will mess things up.  A friend of mine said years ago, “The Christian life is hard to live without God.”  In his usual ironic way, Marlon nailed it.  What he was really saying was that it is impossible to live the Christian life apart from God.

And then, there is the preposition “for.”  To live for God means that I seek to trust and obey, to glorify God, to make God look even a fraction of how good God really is.  To live for God requires my very best intentions, will, plans and actions.

So prepositions matter, in my opinion.  The order matters as well.  If I start with living for or through God, I’ve already messed up.  I need start with the in—God’s everywhere presence.  Then, I need to continue with through—God’s every-when empowerment.  Finally, I need to live for God—recognizing that I am not the center of my universe; God is.  It is in, through and for God that I need to live!  Only in that order does my life find its proper order.

IMPORTANT UPDATE!

I just got an e mail from a friend who had read today’s blog.  He had some excellent suggestions for making it even better.

“. . . [Y]ou forgot WITH, which is my favorite preposition. God uses WITH more than any other preposition when describing himself and us, n’est ce pas?  On another note, I think of prepositions as VERBS. Gives them more CLOUT, if you will.”

Both points are well taken, and will be the subject of future blogs, I hope!