Adore: A Simple Practice for Experiencing God in the Middle Minutes of Your Day

by Sara Hagerty

You don’t measure my strength, my ability, my productivity, God. You don’t see me as I so often see me. I can despise me, yet You look at me, and You find delight in me. I praise You, God, for Your mercy that is not contingent upon my performance or my self-sufficient strategies or my wherewithal. I resent my ill performance, and You lean into me, here. You don’t look away, You look in with mercy.

Your pleasure in me hinges not on my performance but where I set my eyes. I adore You for this currency of mercy.

Even if it was merely a rote habit, I could adore alongside entertaining all the thoughts of what I should do and what I wasn’t; we don’t perceive His Word as intercepting our negative thought swirl until we let it.

You made Yourself into flesh which could be moved by flesh. You loved. Not cold or distant but stirred by the ones You formed and inside the skin they wore. I adore You, God. You didn’t merely put on my frame but allowed Yourself to be moved by my heart cries.

Your Son wept my tears. The God who put on man and lived man’s pain made ethereal love real, tangible. O God, who knows me, Your life bent downward so that I would know You on my insides. You put on skin for me.

Your wet tears fell on dusty desert roads. Holiness spilled out onto the earth You spoke into existence. Just as You received her, Your earth received a symbol of the humanity You wore in that time when love broke through flesh. The sounds of Your heart, borne outward as You wept, were heard by broken people. You let broken people witness Your body’s manifestation of love, broken for them.

Trauma has a way of distilling into a single moment.

I brought into my conversation with God a history of diagnoses and doctor’s appointments and fear confirmed by test results. I didn’t posture. I came angry, with questions I’d buried when we lowered my dad into the ground, but that resurfaced. I knew God could handle me.

Adoration enabled me to say what my mind and heart could not believe, from a place of such vulnerability that His Word washed me. I didn’t posture or pretend. I came broken and angry and sad to His Word. I told Him I didn’t believe phrases that said He is “my strength,” “my shield,” “my stronghold,” and I pleaded with Him to meet me in my unbelief. I cried onto the pages of my Bible.

The LORD preserves the simple; I was brought low, and He saved me. Return to your rest, O my soul, for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. For You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. —PSALM 116:6–8

I disrobed myself of pretense before Him and learned that my Sunday-school answers kept me from the honesty I needed to grow in intimacy with Him.

God doesn’t coach us out of our pain, He holds us in it.

We work to avoid the mistakes that God turns around and uses to show us His tender nearness. He leans in to reach us in the midst of what we are tempted to resent.

My weakness stirs You. The parts of me that I despise, the reminders of this temporal body of death, move You on my behalf. You love me, even in my humanity. Especially in my humanity. My humanity invokes Your compassion, God. When I am me, weak, You reveal Yourself as both strong and tender. You are not annoyed by me or my temporality. You are soft toward me.

My frailty—in You—isn’t to be despised; it’s to be carried to that place at Your feet where my life releases the bow I was made to give and You write Your name on all that I am not.

We humans need a proxy, and He lights the world with His majesty to draw our eyes up to see its source. In adoration, “one’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun” (C. S. Lewis). His beauty in creation serves a purpose: to give us a taste for the majestic. Just like when we drove through the night to reach the beach year after year, when we taste His majesty, we want more.

As I adored, using words I didn’t believe and feeling frustrated, I arrived at this notion: rejoicing is the fruit of being helpless and having Him help. Thus, joy is possible when the air conditioning breaks. His impartation of joy is available to ones like me who need help, who are tired of daydreaming a life that isn’t theirs, who want something different out of their current minute.

But when I adore Him as the one who takes pleasure in me, my gait softens. My shoulders unclench. I release relief in my breath. Failure sent me on a footrace toward better behavior when all He wanted was to receive me and all my failings.

Slide the watch off your wrist. Open your eyes to the view along the way.

Grow slow feels hard to me when I peer at what others are doing. But it feels invigorating when I consider that the God of all time ordains my times and seasons—so when He says, Grow slow, the phrase promises growth. Grow slow isn’t stagnancy; it’s the true metric for endurance that our digital world doesn’t heed. What I get when I wrestle with this invitation not to grow as the world grows but to grow slow is the revelation that my heart is much more patterned toward the timing and thinking of the world than I’ve ever acknowledged.

I adore You for clothing Yourself in humanity that I might one day see Your face.

Adoration turns a self-aware moment into a holy encounter with God, no matter how messy.

I come crying (sometimes literally and sometimes with that gut-cry that says one word: “Help!”), and my God responds with Himself, strong enough to fill in all that I cannot.

The spirited conversations with God when we feel strong and capable take on a different flavor when He reveals Himself as He always is—our only option. God pursued me in the bleak midwinter by allowing me to realize the unfamiliarity of shepherding, the awkwardness I felt by His pursuing me.

the light of my life isn’t health, nor is it the security of forever health or long life. It’s Him. He is the light of my life.

Adoration became my needed pause. It allowed the memory of His testimonies. It slowed my racing mind. It centered me on His Word, my only sense of security. It brought His presence to the page over time.

You turn the bitter into sweet. Not one bitter moment is exempt from Your leadership. You take every pain, every ache, every loss and turn it into something of Your making. I adore You, God who infuses every loss and every potential loss with Yourself. You restore with Yourself. You heal with Yourself. You put what was broken back together with Yourself.

Aware of my Hallmark hope, I adored Him for saving me into a hope that doesn’t require even a thread of perspective. It doesn’t need a thread of dreaming or planning or vision. I could start with nothing and receive His hope. His hope thrives best when I start with nothing. I adored Him through Romans 8:24–25 and other verses and saw that ground zero is the prime place for God to birth a right perspective of His hope.