Savoring of the Ordinary

Yesterday I was watchful with my time.  It was not a day of productivity as if I was on an assembly line.  But it was not wasted in any sense of the word.

It was a day of small things.

If someone had asked, "So, what did you do today?"  I would have said, "Give me a minute. Let me think about it."  There were no scheduled events or grand plans, but just abiding in the unfolding hours.

I tended to what was needed.  I finished a book.  I jotted down thoughts for a talk I'm giving next week. And I spent most of the afternoon, picking up broken branches and sticks in the yard, cleaning up after the winter's wild party and getting ready for spring ready to burst forth.

It was not an empty day without meaning and purpose, but watchful and attentive of little ordinary things, that of which most of our lives are filled.  Even in subtle, daily ways, God brings His glory.  Even in what we consider ordinary, God writes His faithfulness all over it. And plants His fruit.

In his book Supper of the Lamb, author Robert Farrer Capon wrote about the extravagance of the ordinary.  He even included an entire fascinating chapter on the magnificence of cutting up an onion in preparation of a meal.  Oh, the weight of glory we miss in our familiar tasks, that which we never notice.  Because we are so caught up in usefulness, we are unaware of the beauty in it.

He wrote, "...for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored."

Yesterday, I savored. 

 

The Mighty One, God the LORD,

speaks and summons the earth

from the rising of the sun to its setting.

Out of Zion, 

     the perfection of beauty,

God shines forth.

                     Psalm 50. 1-2

Not ripe yet

 

 

Bananas take time to ripen.  And those key words “take time to ripen” can mean only one thing, the dreaded W word:  wait.  There are those who attempt to speed up the process, but bananas pretty much take their own sweet time to mature.

I even googled “How long for a banana to ripen?”  And the answer was pretty much “we don’t know” in so many words.  It depends.  They say 24 hours to five days.  We are still waiting.

The pictured bananas are still deep in the process. 

The Bible speaks of ripening as what is ready for reaping or gathering, fit for use, attaining full development, perfection or maturity, prepared and ready for action.

And so we wait for the ripening things of life – such as prayer and changing relationships and hard situations and our own maturing.  Hurry, Lord, we want to say. What is taking so long?

And He reminds us of bananas.  Not yet.  Not ready yet.  Ripening takes time.  Ripening requires waiting.

That may mean His divine readiness of time, place, need, protection and direction.

Or my heart ripening into it. 

I may be the one not ready.

Waiting in God’s vocabulary is not a passive noun, but an active verb.  God says, “Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning.” (Luke 12. 35)

                  And “Trust Me in this.  Even in the waiting.”

In the waiting, much is revealed.  Much is redeemed.  And hearts are changed.  Even our own.

It is not what we are waiting for, but what God ripens in us during the waiting.

 

But I trust in you, O LORD.

I say, “You are my God.”

My times are in Your hand.

                   Psalm 31. 15

 

Waiting doesn’t produce answers or hurry up the ripening.  Waiting builds trust.

 

 

 

 

Room with a view

We tucked in a brisk hike this morning, sneaking it into our schedules before resuming our appointments for the day.  If we were going to go, it had to be now.  The rain was coming.  Again. 

We fully knew that the ground was already saturated from last week's Noah's ark kind of downpour, but the miry bogs were still passable, and hey, some things in life are messy.   A winter's hike is gonna be cold, and your shoes are gonna to get really muddy. But a little adventure is good for the soul, even in deep winter with frosty grey skies.

Winter is not the off-season, like dead-time between exhibits at a museum.  These months produce an ever-rotating exhibit of masterpieces, carefully curated views, the enormity of gravity-defying trees, the deep initials of winter carved into the bark, the plaintive cry of a barred owl ("who, who, who cooks for you?"), and always that which is surprising and staggering even on well-traveled paths, hiding in plain sight of the familiar.

The invisible becomes visible, not by any command of my own imagination, but in what I never noticed before in this sanctuary of the unexpected. Voices of the forest surround me in a liturgical call and response between the birds and squirrels and the righteousness of trees. 

For you shall go out in joy,

and be led forth in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

   shall break forth into singing,

and all the trees of the field

   shall clap their hands.

                        Isaiah 55. 12

I never come home unchanged by the wonders of the woods. There is a glory there. The light filtering through the shadows of trees decorate my dreams at night.  My shoes crusty with mud at the garage door are not the only tangible evidence of being there.

It was sloppy this morning, as expected, but the trail was still there, a series of footprints, paving the way through the impossible for another hiker, who wanders, who seeks, who suffers.  We gather strength by what we see, by what we breathe, on a  pilgrimage through this cemetery of winter trees which groan with ancient arthritic pains, grip the soaked ground, hold on for dear life through fierce winter winds, but still stretch upward for what is next.  They know the brilliance that is coming.

Our little hike in the woods consumed barely an hour out of my day, but when we returned home, it was as if our clocks were turned back and the day had started all over again. There is no longer anything ordinary, a small day not despised but for what eternity has broken forth over it. 

We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.

                           T. S. Eliot
                            from his Four Quartets

To do list

 I am often amused by the comings and goings of the day, because there are always designs embedded, not to interrupt or distract,  but to change my course.  It is not that we lay our plans before the LORD that He might be able to squeeze into our predetermined schedules and schemes and control.  But that we ask God to lay out His plans before us for this day.  

In looking to God for His plans and purposes and intentions, there are no interruptions, just divine appointments we had not foreseen.  We have no idea how we will be affected, nor how others are impacted.  God always works in multiple outcomes of which we are rarely aware.

The most interesting things about our day -- or even about our lives-- are not necessarily or even rarely what we set out or planned to do.  

We need His surprises to show us what else might be possible.

My mom was a professional violinist.  In a box of my mom's chaotic stack of papers that I went through when she passed away, I found an index card on which she had written:  "I always wanted to be famous.  But a lot better things happened because I am not." 

We have ideas and pursuits and grand schemes, but there is always something a lot deeper that infiltrates, something more profound is on the move -- and that would be the fingerprints of God.  I miss out on the wonders, if I am trying to control the outcome.

Pray.  Seek God.  Work hard.  Do your best. Stay at your post.  Listen and watch and respond to what God brings into this day.  Hold outcomes loosely.  Something far richer and unexpected is waiting in the foyer.  

Last year, we never saw the pandemic coming nor how it would alter our lives.  But our plans for 2020 were not derailed, just aligned with His.  God was with each one of us through it.  God is still with us.  And He is redeeming in ways we cannot yet see.  Every day is a story of God's faithfulness.

To do list?  In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers notes what he experienced over and over in his life:  "Obey God in the thing He shows you and instantly the next thing is opened up."

Walking with the LORD leads us to a different place, even right where we are.  We go into this day with refreshed strength.  We see all things with a different heart.  And we join God in what He is already doing. 

O LORD, 

    You beckon us, 

"Over here, follow Me."

Differently

 I love to run in the woods.  Because when I run, I think differently, I pray differently, I listen differently, I untangle knots differently, and I respond differently.  I try to run a slightly varied route each day, so it does not become a stale routine, and so that God draws my attention to Himself.  And sometimes I run somewhere completely new.

The most fruitful way from one point to another is rarely the straight and familiar line, head down slogging along, but running with eyes wide open because of what we can see and hear and sense and come to know.  There are often times when looking up, I see the wonders of the wild, the flight of an owl, the swooping of a hawk, or staggered by the intricate black lace of countless trees etched across a blue satin sky.  And still, there is so much that I miss of His glory because I am not even looking.

How we choose to run our path today --influences what we see planted and nurtured and growing along the way.  What has changed.  What has grown since.  Or sometimes observing what is pointblank in front of us, "I never noticed that other trail before,"  that enormous sycamore tree, those wildflowers just beginning to bloom.  It is not just something old and something new, but seeing differently.

What is a different way through this hard situation or amidst difficult relationships?  How do I approach this differently because I am a believer and "It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me." (Galatians 2. 20)?

What has God placed before me today?  A new road or a new way may surprisingly appear in what I have only considered as the familiar or the ordinary. But we waste a lot of time looking for new doors, or exit signs, or being distracted by the ancient delusion of "if only I were only someplace else!"  

It is not the path itself, but how we run it differently -- how we view more closely and tread and experience the path we are already on, right where we are.  Almost always when I am running the trails around me, even those I know so well, I see something I've never seen before.  Or grasp something I've not thought --or prayed -- about before.  Or a passage or verse of Scripture comes to mind, hauntingly particular to what I am thinking about, what I am worrying about, what is the first step to take or the next, and to "trust Me in this."

How we see God differently affects how we see others differently, which influences how we see ourselves differently, which totally changes how we view circumstances differently.  And all those impact what we see, what we do, and how we respond to His leading....differently. 

 

Behold, I am doing a new thing;

now it springs forth,

do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert.

                Isaiah 43. 19 

 

See you later.  I'm going for a run.