Pastoral Thought--February 4

Today I am having a hard time focusing. . . This happens periodically. The reasons are multifaceted; some are deeply personal—personal in that they are part of my personhood that I cannot escape. My mind, at times, runs faster than the rest of my body. I have even had my mind running so fast that my words cannot keep up with what’s happening in my head. The whole thing is frenetic when I wish that it could be still. But that is not how I was made. This is partly what I pace so much when I talk on the phone—my mind is moving a million miles an hour so my body tries to keep up. 

Today my focus-issues are more personal in nature. 

Across the hall I hear the 3-year-olds of our nursery school talking about the letter “D” and a pesky groundhog who lives in Punxsutawney and seems to like saying that spring will never come! Plus, Jennifer and I are excited to welcome home a certain 18-year-old from college for the weekend. It feels like he has been gone forever even though it has only been two weeks. We are excited to have him home and to have him come to church with us this weekend (I suspect that he is excited to see his dog and sleep in his bed—the Edinboro bed is very uncomfortable for him).

With that frenetic pace at work in me, I remembered the woods of Gordon Hempton from the podcast On Being. In the interview Grodon talks a lot about being present to listen, which for him, involves slowing down and paying closer attention to what is happening around him. His words spoke to my heart and my placement today as I am thinking frenetically. . . He says: 

"I grew up thinking that I was a listener, except on my way to graduate school one time, I simply pulled over making the long drive from Seattle, Washington, to Madison, Wisconsin, pulled over in a field to get some rest and a thunderstorm rolled over me. While I lay there, and the thunder echoed through the valley, and I could hear the crickets, I just simply took it all in. And it’s then I realized that I had a whole wrong impression of what it meant to actually listen. I thought that listening meant focusing my attention on what was important even before I had heard it and screening out everything that was unimportant even before I had heard it. 

In other words, I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I really hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. It was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place. That changed my life. I had one question, and that was, how could I be 27 years old and have never truly listened before? I knew, for me, I was living life incredibly wrong, so I abandoned all my plans, I dropped out of graduate school, I moved to Seattle, took my day job as a bike messenger and only had one goal, and that was to become a better listener.”

Slow down. . . and listen. . . become a better listener when the pacing of your life seems to demand that you press on or press-faster. Don’t try to become more than whom God created you to be. Gordon’s words stopped me. I put down my tea. . . Set my book aside. . . I minimized what I was working on. . . And just listened to God. My heartbeat slowed. My mind relaxed. I heard the words of the song: “In this Very Room. . .” If you are not familiar with the words of the song it ends with the line: 

"For Jesus, Lord Jesus ... is in this very room."

I wonder what you might experience with Jesus when you spend time listening as I did this morning? I wonder how helpful a practice such as this might be in your day when you too find things spinning out of control? 

Blessings

Rev. Derek