Saturation and Overflow Part 2
In another post, I wrote about my fresh appreciation for watering house plants to saturation, such that the water overflows from the drainage hole and leads to much healthier plants.
I then drew parallels to my spiritual life, saying, “If I want my life to look like [Paul’s prayer that God’s love will overflow in me], to be united with the greatest possible amount of Jesus, I need to saturate myself with his Word, through more-than-the-dregs-of-my-water-bottle amounts of reading, listening, worship, prayer, study, rest, and obedience. I already know this, of course, because I’ve seen the fruit of this before and will see it again.”
That prompted this question from a reader: what does the fruit of the overflow actually look like for me?
I took some time to examine the patterns, searching for the best way to describe what I’ve noticed. Without trying to oversimplify it, I’ll say this: the more scripture I bring into my life, the more it naturally flows back out.
If you’ve been around a Christian church for any period of time, this is something you’ve heard plenty about. It’s certainly something I’d been told a gazillion times before, but it wasn’t until we moved last year that I really appreciated how this has played out in my own life.
A relocation, especially one 1,000 miles away, means starting over. New roads and traffic patterns. New grocery stores. New churches, New pickleball courts. New neighborhoods. New weather. New people.
While waiting to develop new friendships and routines, life can feel slower… quieter… lonelier. Such seasons typically have two profound impacts on my life.
First, I turn to God more often…
Times of struggle and heartache prompt me to cry out to him in frustration and sadness.
Without all the friends and activities and general busyness, I simply have more time for him—more time for prayer and Bible reading/study.
This leads to the second impact—I hear from God more often…
More time spent in the Word = more chances to hear his voice.
Less “noise” in my life = less opportunities to hear competing voices.
Shortly after this move, I decided to spend some of my newfound free time attempting (once again) to memorize scripture. This has always been a struggle for me, but this book by Glenna Marshall was a big inspiration to try again. Here are some of the tactics I’ve tried:
Write verses on note cards and hanging them up all over the house (my husband thought it was really weird when I hung them in the shower, but it is a place I visit pretty often and usually just stare at the wall!)
Wear them as temporary tattoos
Listen to songs whose lyrics are straight from scripture
Use verses as my tech passwords
Of those four ideas, the last two are the most successful for me. I can’t remember my grocery list, but I can remember every word to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire from 1989. Music is the absolute best way for me to memorize anything, so I’m beyond grateful for musicians like Ellie Holcomb, who set verses to music in such a beautiful way.
And then there are my company’s IT people, who think it best that we all change our passwords every 90 days. Oh and it also had to have a million characters and every available punctuation mark… 😒
After a year on the job, which coincided with our move, I realized I had to come up with something I could actually remember but would be hard to hack. That’s when I used MountainsMeltLikeWaxBeforeTheLord-P97:5 (don’t worry, this hasn’t been my actual password for quite some time). Yes, it’s ridiculously long but that also means it’s super secure and forced me to memorize Psalm 97:5! I’ve since repeated this pattern with other verses and guess what—it actually works for me!
Not only does this mean I’ve been more successful in memorizing more verses this past year, those verses now flow out of me with little prompting. In fact, I started noticing I’d wake up with the verses playing in my head. This seemed so odd—I began recording them in a journal. Here are a few examples:
April 17: “Let us not grow weary in doing good… in due time we will reap the harvest” (Galatians 6:9)
May 6: “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ” (Romans 8:1)
June 1: “Oh Lord God… nothing is too difficult for thee” (Jeremiah 32:17)
July 16: “Lord, you are more precious than silver; Lord, you are more costly than gold…” (Psalm 19)
Then on August 15, our dog died and we were devastated. The next morning, I woke up singing the title track from Ellie Holcomb’s All of My Days album: “You’re here, even in my deepest pain… all of my days… I will never walk alone, for you are with me…” (Psalm 23).
I found this to be enormously comforting on the very first morning without the walking buddy I’d had for the previous eight years…
It was just a few days later that I learned about the importance of watering my plants to the point of overflow. I stood there letting the hose run longer than normal, thinking about how a year of focused scripture memorization was resulting in such an overflow that I, quite literally, wake up singing the words. Before I knew it, my eyes were overflowing as well.
Thank you, Jesus.
This morning I woke up singing, "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path..." 💜