In Our Comings and Goings -- Inktober 2 #discover

My biggest creative moments rarely arrive when I am sitting at my desk, but when I am doing something else, mostly when I am doing something that bans any kind of creative action at that very moment.   Traveling 70 miles per hour on Interstate 40, I am bombarded by ideas, the revving up of my limited creativity, hardly the place to write, even to jot down a couple of words on any available scrap of paper.

But as soon as I arrive at my destination or back home and pull into the garage, as soon as I turn off the car, any prevailing thought or idea evaporates, like birds swiftly flying through the air and into the unknown. 

I sit down immediately to a blank screen.  An hour later, it is still staring back at me without words.  Doing something else appears to be the key to connecting the dots.

I wait these things out.  Those vanishing thoughts are not an end in themselves, but the beginning of yet, perhaps, another direction, another part of the story.  What has flown past once will return, what has caught my attention will take up residence in a different form.

What is significant, what bears tremendous purpose, what brings fruit, are not necessarily our intentional pursuits -- or on our radar-- but what we discover along the way of doing something else.  It is in our comings and goings, we find the deeper things.  They don't arrive on our doorstep, nor drop magically in our laps. We do not necessarily discover them in extraordinary circumstances, nor do they just sprint to us.  But it is in doing something else that we find them, even in the most familiar surroundings, often in the mundane, especially on the way looking for something else.

Call them as they are:  divine appointments, eternal encounters, the hand of God, the sacred connections and holy intersections and the clicking together of two seemingly unrelated things that only God can snap seamlessly into place.

Discovering is living expectantly even in the ordinary, which is never so ordinary at all.

...and the hand of the LORD
 was upon him there.

                          Ezekiel 1. 3

Right upon us here as well, right where we are, right in the midst of this, right under our feet. Not just a matter of discovery, but direction.  Do we recognize it?  God sings His faithfulness over us.

As Wendell Berry says in his iconic novel Jayber Crow, "...and times when, looking back at earlier times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error.  But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led."

Several years ago, as my husband Bill retrieved a bag of potting soil from under the deck, he found not just the plastic sack of dirt he was looking for, but what he was not looking for.  The "lost" pole for our bird feeder was poking out from under the gravel, hidden in plain sight for five years, discovered when we were on the way to something else.  

We cannot take credit for discoveries.  God wakes us up to what is already there, waiting to emerge, waiting to be grasped and shared.  And sadly, we miss what we have left untried.

When we least expect it, as we are being faithful to Him in what we are doing, God brings an opportunity along our way, unexpected and in the most unlikely situations, sometimes even in the uncanny.  When we ask where did that come from?  God chuckles. And all these "unrelated" things that we have been doing and pursuing are just the training ground for what God has placed before us.  Just waiting to ripen. 

Just waiting to be discovered.