Adore

Do you ever have a word jump out at you in various places and contexts? Lately, I keep noticing the word adore. It keeps surfacing. Like in the beautiful image above of Mary holding her Son, in the quiet act of adoring Jesus in prayer. Or in an article I recently read about the neurobiology of “glimmer” and gratitude. It feels like the Spirit is drawing a circle around this word, this action: when we adore, we don’t just observe; we receive and release. We make meaning. We transcend what is immediately before us.

Adoration is like the Sea of Galilee. The Jordan flows into it and then flows out of it, and because it receives and gives, it is alive—teeming with movement, nourishment, and possibility. But the same Jordan flows into the Dead Sea, where the water stops, stays, and stagnates. Nothing can live there.

The heart that adores becomes like Galilee: open, flowing, alive. The heart that clings, analyzes, or hoards becomes like the Dead Sea: full, but unmoving.

Saint Augustine understood this dynamic long before we had language for glimmer or neurobiology. He wrote of the mystery that God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, that even our own spirit cannot fully grasp the depths within. “We see now through a glass in a dark manner,” he said, and yet—even in that dimness—God enlightens what we do know and holds what we do not. There is something profoundly freeing in that. Adoration is not about control. It is about consenting to be seen, known, and loved by the One who understands us completely.

Maybe that’s why adoration feels like glimmer. It awakens gratitude. It keeps the waters moving. It reminds us that reality is always more than what we can measure or name. It hints that our darkness is already becoming “as the noonday” in God’s sight.

So today, I’m paying attention to what I adore—and how that act of adoring changes me. It softens me. It enlarges me. It keeps me flowing like Galilee instead of settling like the Dead Sea. It teaches me to trust the God who knows me better than I know myself.

And perhaps that is the quiet invitation for all of us:
to adore what is good,
to let it move through us,
and to allow God to lead us, slowly, gently, into the light where we will one day see face to face.