How about you? Are you back to your ordinary routine after the holidays? As the first post-holiday week rolls around are you glad all the extra activity is past? Does it feel good to be back to “normal”? Or, are you a little let down?
Maybe we need an little encouragement to pay attention during these ordinary, normal, routine (maybe boring?) days. Recently some words from Frederick Buechner gave me the encouragement I needed,
I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day’s work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. . . . If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. ( http://www.frederickbuechner.com/content/life-itself-grace )
If you approached each day as a “fathomless mystery” what might you find in front of you? What might you see? What might you hear? What grace might you encounter? And what grace might you be able to bestow on another?
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Where will grace next surprise you?
Charles
{ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est}