Thanks for taking the time to subscribe and read (about four minutes) the newsletter (it’s issue #29!). It has been a few weeks since our last newsletter. My current writing project is too academic for this platform. This newsletter normally is about corporate worship, but I share this more generic devotional with the hope that it encourages you.
Blessings!
My wife and I met David and his fiancé at dinner.
“Tell me about yourself!” I said to David.
David looked me in the eyes and said, “I am a birder.”
“Does that mean ‘birdwatcher?’” I asked.
No, his fiancé replied. A birdwatcher enjoys casually observing birds outside their window or during a walk through the fresh air. A birder, however, is much more serious.
How serious? This birder is taking his bride to a distant location for a honeymoon of exotic birding.
Birds are all around us, but we don’t pay attention. Most people have a vague sense that birds fly overhead and chirp in the trees, but only a few could remember a particular bird that they have seen today.
David keeps a list of bird species that he wants to see this year using an app called “Merlin.” This list expresses his bird love and keeps him alert to the birds around him. David and his “birder” friends walk around with an ever-keener eye for the exact same birds that surround all of us.
This sort of attentiveness takes different forms.
Where I see only maddening traffic, my car friends triumphantly spot a 1987 Buick Grand National Regal GNX.
Where I see only nice trees, my botanically-minded wife sees Crape Myrtles alongside Star and Saucer Magnolias.
Where I see only a bouquet, some women see messages. A dozen begonias to these women communicates something very different (“beware of danger”) from a dozen gardenias (“hidden love”).
My point is that Christians should develop this sort of attentiveness to God’s things, to God’s grace. In Psalm 9, David writes, “I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.”
We can recount God’s wonderful deeds as we are able to see them.
Instead of having a generic sense of God’s grace (like overhead birds, maddening traffic, or nice trees), our study of God’s Word should train us to recognize different types of his grace.
Then we can more wisely sort through our visual data, hunting to discover the species of grace that we are looking for. Look! there's a sustaining grace! a healing grace! a grace of provision!
Christian discipleship, Tish Harrison Warren writes, is “a lifetime of training in how to pay attention to the right things, to notice God’s work in our lives and in the world.” This instinct is not natural, but learned and cultivated until it is second nature. “Through long practice,” writes Warren, “we unfix our gaze from distractions and fears in order to attend to that which God attends. We learn to watch” (Prayer in the Night, 59).
Different Christian denominations emphasize different aspects of the faith with their attending strengths and weaknesses. I admire my charismatic friends who have cultivated this attentiveness—this suspicion that God is at work around us for our good. He has certainly earned that beautiful form of suspicion from me.
God’s grace is all around us. Will the eyes of our hearts be open enough to see it?
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