Today I read a curious command from God in Psalm 81:10: “Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”
I ask so many questions:
What does it mean that I open wide my mouth? How do I open wide my mouth? What prevents me from opening wide my mouth?
I found this gem of a quote: “‘Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it;’ widen and dilate the desires and expectations of your souls, and God is able to fill every chink to the vastest capacity. This honours God; when we greaten our expectations upon him, it is a sanctifying of God in our hearts,” said Thomas Case (1598- 1682), in “Morning Exercises.”
Widen my desires and expectations! Greaten my expectations! Yes!
But I think about what it means to open wide my mouth–literally.
I’m someone who cannot chew gum or crunch on too many hard foods because I’ll have jaw soreness and stiffness. I avoid opening my mouth too wide for this reason. I don’t want it to get stuck! Oh, the human jaw! I learn that the temporomandibular joints are the most complex joints in the body. I also learn this astonishing fact according to Dr. Michael Roizen. He says this: The jaw is “the only joint in the body that purposely dislocates itself during motion.”
It purposely dislocates. It purposely upsets itself, disturbing something natural, to work. When I “open wide my mouth” I’m disrupting, disturbing, dislocating the normal position of the jaw.
All morning, I think of what’s grown too stiff and clamped shut in my complex life. What can I allow God to disrupt, disturb, and dislocate to enable a wide mouth–a wide heart–that, like Case says will dilate my desires and greaten my expectation of Him? What does God wish to show me of Himself that my clamped little life won’t allow?
Help me open wide my mouth, God!