Waiting, listening, praying: The Attentive Life

"I hope that this book will help us to pay close attention both to the beams that surround us and the Source that upholds us, in such a way that time and eternity, this world and the next, are always intersecting."
—Leighton Ford, The Attentive Life

As the world swirls faster and faster about us, headlines scream, sirens blare, lights flash, computer screens whir, iPhones sing and shout. And people—who created all this stuff to make life easier, safer or simply more fun—begin to burn out. Or already have.

Enter, for one, the Slow Movement. Stress has obviously led to unprecedented health problems. ‘Stop the world I want to get off’ is a feeling we all have sometimes. Why is this happening? What’s wrong? What are we searching for? The one thing common to all these trends is connection. We want connection to all that it means to live; we want to live connected lives.

Interestingly, the French word for ‘slow’ is lent. And this particular season of the year, the 40 days before Easter in Christian circles, is called Lent. Not for that reason of course—it’s just that the connection fascinates me. The term’s real origins come from old German. Since spring is the time of year when days become longer, the Germans called the season Lencten, derived from their own word for ‘long’.

So Christians sometimes try to fast from something during Lent, which in a round-about way is how Mardi Gras, the Tuesday before Lent, got its name. Translating from the French it means Fat Tuesday: Eat all you can so it won’t spoil while you're fasting (once upon a time); eat and party all you can just because you can (now).

Yet the true idea of Lent is, within Christianity, to do less of something, symbolizing giving up one’s own selfish desires and focus more on getting right with God. To pay attention to caps-lock LIFE, instead of this, that and the other.

Which brings me to a beautiful, brilliant book, The Attentive Life: Discerning God’s Presence in All Things, by Leighton Ford. The miraculous story of how I connected with Dr. Ford and discovered his work and writings I'll leave for another day.

Dr. Ford explains his certainty that too often we keep ourselves busy and distracted out of fear that if we slow down and are still, we may look inside and find nothing there.

"What God is doing in both [our vocational and our personal journeys] is similar; very much like the interweaving of the intricate strands in a Celtic cord, a work of art designed to show how God is at work weaving the inner and outer parts of our lives into a unified pattern.” 

In a section entitled One Who Paid Attention: C.S. Lewis Looking Along a Beam, Ford writes of Lewis’s realization of “two ways of looking at life: looking at the dancing and moving events, the happenings and surroundings of each day, and looking ‘sideways’ so to speak, ‘along the beam’—to see not only what is happening but why, and what it is that gives meaning to the happenings of our lives.”

Ford blames French philosopher René Descartes for bedeviling us with dualism: the idea of a division between mind and matter. “Many of us now assume,” he writes, “that knowledge is either ‘scientific’ and based on facts or ‘mystical’ and based on fancy, and never the twain shall meet.”

Lewis provides the counterargument from Christianity, Ford notes, it being "the most materialistic" of all religions. “God must have loved material things: after all, he made them!"

"We need again to heed his [Lewis’s] wisdom. True knowledge is found in the Word who became flesh, as we look both ‘at’ and ‘along’ the beams each and every day.

"This knowledge from God and of God, and not just the experiments of the scientist or the intuitions of the mystic, will save us and transform this world.”

In God's Slipstream: Listening to the whisper of the Spirit

At a Vital Church Planting Conference in Toronto a few years ago, the U.K.’s Rev. David Male imagined the future by suggesting that pioneering church planters committed to expanding the mission-shaped church should “keep in the slipstream of God.”

"In looking to what lies ahead," Mr. Male said, “Listen to the whisper of the spirit.”

He also warned church pioneers not to fall into the trap of tarting up a bankrupt, old-model church in contemporary disguise to try to attract the unchurched. He compared this to the makeover given old cars on the television show Pimp My Ride. Stay away from the “pimp my church” approach, he said.

To illustrate for modern-day disciples, Male spoke of the uncertain future faced by the disciples after Jesus’ death. He also quoted John V. Taylor’s observation that mission is more like an unexpected explosion than a physical extension of an old building.

[Click here to read the entire article in the Anglican Journal]

Jesus and Satan argue about computer skills

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly, God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, “THAT'S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.”

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away. They moused. They googled.

They downloaded. They e-mailed. They e-mailed with attachments. They did spreadsheets! They wrote reports. They created labels and cards. They created charts and graphs. They did some genealogy reports. They did every job known to humanity, and more.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell. Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off. Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld. Jesus just sighed. Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them re-started their computers.

Satan searched frantically, screaming, “It's gone! It's all GONE! I lost everything when the power went out!”

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly added all his files from the past two hours of work to a memory stick to show God. Satan observed this and became irate.

“Wait!” he screamed. “That's not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don't have any?”

God just shrugged and said, "JESUS SAVES."

Carrying a mystery to term

“For with God nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment.” (Luke 1:37, Amplified Bible, Classic Edition)

The mystery both enfolded by and enfolding the Christmas season never really ends. It didn’t even begin that first Christmas. It simply revealed itself to us: to all and any who could see or hear, listen—who had ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’—in the eons to come.

In Mary’s encounter with the angel and then with the Holy Spirit those 2,000-plus years ago, the divine seed was planted. Young Mary treasured and wondered at the words spoken to her, and her body nurtured the precious ‘Word’ to term. A mysterious Word, existing since the beginning of time, wrapped in a baby and born into a world so already full of its own words, wonder, beauty and noise—that hearing, seeing, the capital-W Word and Wonder beyond and behind it can be nigh on impossible.

Imagine carrying and giving birth to a mystery. In a way every mother does, but can you imagine carrying and giving birth to a world-changing mystery that both pre-existed you, life itself, and contained the answers of time and eternity? Completely impossible to comprehend, and that’s the point. Mary embraced what she did not understand, nurtured and treasured it. The holy seed came to term and the world would never be the same.

Have you ever had an inexplicable, dramatic encounter with holiness, with God? By its very nature you can’t explain it to anyone else, but like Mary, you can treasure and nurture it. Trust that the divine seed will come to term.

People who hold onto and nurture what God has said to them or allowed them to experience—even though they may not understand it—carry the fruit of the revelation from God that says: ‘Nothing will be impossible with God.’ That’s the commonly translated version of the angel’s words to young Mary when she wondered aloud how on earth she could give birth. A more accurate translation from the Greek would be more like ‘no freshly spoken word of God will ever come to you that does not contain the ability to perform itself.’ What an astonishing gift!

Safe within Your Love

If the world, your world, seems crazy right now, this is the book for you.

Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) wrote from her own brokenness, pain, sorrow and loss into incredible peace, joy and ‘foundness’ in God alone.

Her husband had been one of the 19th century’s most celebrated evangelists. Tragedy thundered in via first the loss of a young daughter, later a son, and then public scandal which devastated her marriage.

A wise, discerning woman, Hannah aptly analyzed and examined the day’s religious movements which so mirror many today. Whether attempts to legislate purity or holiness, an over-emphasis on razzle-dazzle emotionalism, the promotion of success in the material world as opposed to spiritual victory over the world-bound soul—she found no truck with any of them.

Safe Within Your Love, a compilation of Hannah Whitall Smith’s writings into a 40-day devotional by David Hazard, is sadly out-of-print. So while I try to convince the publishers to get it out there again, forthwith are some nuggets:

"Earthly cares are a heavenly discipline. But they are even better than a discipline. They are God’s chariots, sent to take the soul to its high places of triumph…. The dangerous ‘vehicle’ is the visible thing; the chariot of God is the invisible.”

"Some Christians think that the fruits which the Bible calls for are some form of outward religious work—such as holding more and more meetings, visiting the poor, conducting charitable works, and so forth. The Bible scarcely mentions these . . . but declares that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). A Christlike character must necessarily be the fruit of Christ’s indwelling.”

Editor and compiler David Hazard offers a reflection at the end of each short chapter. Here’s one gem:

"My Physician Father, I see it now…
For every one of my soul-sicknesses, you give me a ‘medicine’ for my healing.
For my pride and independence, you give one who likes to dominate. For my impatience, you send one who grates. For my criticalness, you give me one who is sorry indeed.
Today, I will receive your treatments . . . even if they sting.”