Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

      In her book An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor paints an unforgettable picture of one of the most well-known stories in the Bible – The story of Moses and the burning bush:
    “Mose’s life changed one day while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep. According to the storyteller, he had led the flock beyond the wilderness to Horeb, the mountain of God, when an angel appeared to him in a burning bush. The bush was not right in front of Moses, however. It must have been over to the side somewhere, because when Moses saw it, he said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’
      “The bush required Moses to take a time-out, at least if he wanted to do more than glance at it. He could have done that. He could have seen the flash of red out of the corner of his eye, said, ‘Oh, how pretty,’ and kept right on driving the sheep. He did not know that it was an angel in the bush, after all. Only the story-teller knew that. Moses could have decided that he would come back tomorrow to see if the bush was still burning, when he had a little more time, only then he would not have been Moses. He would just have been a guy who got away with murder, without ever discovering what else his life might have been about.
      “What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside. Wherever else he was supposed to be going and whatever else he was supposed to be doing, he decided it could wait a minute. He parked the sheep and left the narrow path in order to take a closer look at a marvelous sight. When he did, the storyteller says, God noticed. God dismissed the angel and took over the bush. ‘When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, [Moses, Moses!]’
      “‘Here I am,’ Moses said, and the rest is history. Before God asked Moses to do anything else, however, God asked Moses to take off his shoes. ‘Come no closer!’ God warned him, not because the ground was hot but because it was holy. ‘Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’”
    Summertime is a great time to engage in the spiritual practice of “paying attention.” It’s as simple as sitting down somewhere in the great outdoors, preferably near a body of water or under the shade of a great tree, and being attentive to everything that is happening around you for at least twenty minutes. Whenever I take the time to do this, it never ceases to amaze me how much activity is going on around me without my even being aware of it.
      This last June I had the opportunity to travel to Washington State to see some good friends. In addition to seeing their new home and the church where my friend is a pastor, we were also able to visit Wallace Falls; Deception Pass; the town of Snohomish; and the Pouget Sound. The excursion which made the biggest impression on me was whale watching in the southern section of the Pouget Sound. We were able to follow a pod of Orcas as they made their way around Fox Island. The Orcas swam by boats and homes and kayakers looking for food and enjoying one anothers company. If you were busy fishing or enjoying reading a novel on the beach, they might have swam right by you and you never would have known how close you were to these giants of the ocean. But we were on the lookout and once we spotted them we couldn’t take our eyes off them. It was breathtaking and wonderful to see this family active in their natural habitat.

        You don’t have to travel 1,000 miles to have an experience like I did. It can happen just about anywhere including a walk in the neighborhood, sitting in your backyard, or traveling to a local beach. No matter the particular location, the time spent paying attention to your surroundings always pays a rich dividend. You leave renewed and refreshed, filled with the knowledge that you are deeply blessed and surrounded by God’s grace and love.
        The writer apologist C. S. Lewis once had an experience that awoke him to the wonder of God at work in the natural world. His experience didn’t happen on a mountain top though, but in the most ordinary of locations, a dark and deserted tool shed where he had gone to look for something. A broad beam of sunlight was slanting in through a crack in the top of the door. As he looked at the beam with the dust motes dancing and floating in it, the shaft of sunlight captured his full attention in the darkness.
      Then he moved so that the beam was falling directly on his eye. Instantly the whole scene changed. Looking out through the opening above the door, he could see up through the green leaves moving on the trees to the blue sky beyond and, millions of miles away, the sun.
      It came to him then that there are two ways of looking: looking at and looking along. “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam.” he wrote, “are very different experiences.”
      Just so, he realized, there are 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.
      Would that everyone might have an experience like the one C. S. Lewis describes in the tool shed, it would change forever the way they look at the world and at their lives. To pay close attention to the world in which God has placed you can be a transforming experience! Just ask those who have taken the time to practice this ancient spiritual discipline. They will tell you that though it is challenging and difficult to practice any discipline with regularity, the benefits from living an attentive life are well worth the effort. For it will help you to discern God’s presence in all things, and that is a gift worth pursuing and celebrating and giving thanks for every moment of our lives.

 

Your Fellow Pilgrim on the Journey,
Pastor Greg Kintzi