The Attentive Life E-Book

Leighton Ford

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 331

Beschreibung

Your attention, please.That's what God wants, Leighton Ford discovered. It's the path to becoming like Christ.Distractions, fear and busyness were keeping Ford from seeing God's work in and around him. He was missing God. So he began a journey of longing and looking for God. And it started with paying attention.In these pages, he invites you to journey with him. Using the rich monastic tradition of praying the hours, Ford will walk with you, helping you pay attention to God's work in you and around you throughout each day and in different seasons of your life.If you're busy, distracted, rushing through each day, you might be feeling disconnected from God, unable to see how he's working. You might be missing him. But the way toward him starts with a pause and a prayer—with intention and attention—and becomes a way of life, awake and alive to the peaceful, powerful presence of God.

Leseprobe

You will do well to pay attention

[to the prophetic word] . . . until the day dawns

and the morning star rises in your hearts.

2 Peter 1:19 NIV

Leighton Ford

The Attentive Life

Discerning God’s Presence in All Things

www.ivpress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2008 by Leighton Ford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: bird: Linda Bucklin/iStockphoto window: Ekaterina Fribus/i Stockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9644-8 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3516-4 (print)

To Jeanie

who pays attention

to God, to others, to our family

and to me

so well and so naturally

Contents

AN INTRODUCTION: Short Flights and Quick Returns

One Who Paid Attention:C. S. Lewis Looking Along a Beam

1: PAYING ATTENTION: The Hours of Our Lives

One Who Paid Attention:Simone Weil on a Postage Stamp

2: THE BIRTHING HOUR: Time Before Time

One Who Paid Attention:Vincent Donovan—the Masai Chief, the Missionary and the Lion God

3: DAYBREAK: The Hour of Beginnings

One Who Paid Attention:The Teacher Who Took Off His Hat

4: PRIME TIME: Our Root System

One Who Paid Attention:My Spiritual Director Dog

5: ACTIVE LIFE: A Slower Pace in a Faster World

One Who Paid Attention:Kierkegaard’s Lanterns, Fireworks and Stars

6: THE NOONDAY DEMON: Our Distractible Selves

One Who Paid Attention:How Mother Teresa Kept Going

HOLY STILLNESS: An Interlude

7: WHEN SHADOWS COME: Darkness Comes Early

One Who Paid Attention:Jerry Sittser Trying to Catch the Sun

8: LIGHTING THE LAMPS: The House with Golden Windows

One Who Paid Attention:Henri Nouwen, a Restless Prophet

9: GRANDFATHER TIME: When Evening Comes

One Who Paid Attention:Hwee Hwee Tan—Becoming What We Look At

EPILOGUE: The Journey Home

APPENDIX: Observing the Hours

In Attention to Gratitude

Notes

Permissions

Praise for The Attentive Life

About the Author

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

An Introduction

Short Flights and Quick Returns

I am sitting on a bench at Lost Lagoon, on the edge of the hundreds and hundreds of acres of trees and trails that make up the vast Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. Behind me are the tall buildings of the city. Surrounding the park on three sides are the waters of English Bay and Burrard Inlet. In the background, clouds hover over the mountains that slope down to frame Vancouver—my favorite city in the world, at least to visit.

For much of the past decade and a half I have been coming here for a summertime pilgrimage. I call it a pilgrimage not because Vancouver is such a holy place but because I can get away from my usual routines and hopefully resharpen my attentiveness and imagination.

It is a lazy midsummer afternoon, and I am alone on my spectator’s perch except for a few ducks in the grass by the water’s edge and some bicycle riders on the path behind me. Around the lagoon several couples are walking hand in hand.

My eye is drawn to the fountain spouting up in the center of the lagoon; from there a flight of birds take off in a perfect V-formation. They disappear, then in a few minutes come circling back, and still in formation splash down, their legs extended like the landing gears of the seaplanes descending at nearby Coal Harbor.

Hmm, I think, short flights and quick returns.

As I watch their landing and muse on its symbolism, a seagull comes and sits just by my foot for a minute or two as if to say: “Pay attention now. This show is for you to notice.” It is a message from the birds.

Watching these birds take off and land takes my thoughts back to when we began a new ministry of spiritual mentoring for young leaders. At our very first board meeting the chairman asked me a penetrating question: “What can you do that is unique?” His second was even more pointed: “Do you think you are doing something significant only when—or mostly when—you are traveling, going someplace?”

His question went straight to my heart. Whether short flights or longer ones, much of my life has been spent in going to more than forty countries in ministry as an evangelist and preacher or on special assignment. Now that is changing. I realize that life for me will mean not always being on the go. There will be—like the flight of the birds—more short flights and quick returns.

My work has largely focused on evangelism—“making friends for God,” as I like to put it. But a shift has taken place. Not from evangelism, for I am and always want to be one who shares the good news of Jesus Christ. But now is a time to pay more attention to my own heart, to deepen my own friendship with God and to walk with others who want to do the same.

Vancouver itself has been one of the “busy” places I have flown to across the years, as I have preached here in citywide meetings, led a mission at the university, taught seminars for young leaders. So it is fitting that around the time of my first sabbatical summer here, attentiveness was beginning to matter to me. Here I discovered a new interest in drawing and painting—in learning to pay attention to what is around me.

At the same time I was trying to pay attention in new ways to what is inside me. I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim atTinker Creek and was struck by the way she stalked the fish in a stream near her house in the Virginia countryside. She described how she learned to watch for fish from an oblique angle, where her shadow would not make them shy away. The phrase “stalking my soul” came to me then and has stuck in my imagination.

“We shall not cease from exploration.” This could be a companion word from T. S. Eliot about such stalking, and those words stay with me too. It has been fascinating through the years to explore many parts of the world. Now there is still exploration to be done, and one of the reasons I have written this book and want to share it with you is that we should all be explorers, always, in all things.

Longing and Looking

Each of us is part of a Greater Story, and behind our stories is a Storyteller calling us home. The deepest longing I have is to come home to my own heart, so in a sense I am writing this book for myself. But it is not just about me, for I believe all our stories are of longing and of looking.

That has become very clear to me as I reread the notes and journals I have written in recent years. For many years “journey” was a call to go as I traveled the world in ministry. “Home” was an equally powerful inner voice calling me to stay, to be rooted. Now I realize that these were not only two ways I spent my time but also a response to two notes in my own song: the lure of the road and the call to home.

The call was to be “home on the road,” to bring my real self before the real God, to be changed into his true image, to become all that God has made me to be. It was and is a longing to belong, to have a home for God in my heart.

This sense of longing runs like an underground river through the writings of many observers of the human condition, like the novelist Walker Percy. A character in his Love in theRuins, the lapsed Catholic psychiatrist Tom More, sits in a sand trap on a golf course and muses, “The sand trap and the clouds put me in mind of being ten years old and in love and full of longing. The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing.”

Yet why do I so often hide from this longing? Spiritual inattentiveness, I believe, comes in large part from our fear of being known for who we really are. Often we keep ourselves busy and distracted because we fear that if we slow down and are still, we may look inside and find nothing there.

If the first part of my own journey involved longing, the second has encompassed mainly looking—coming to terms with important parts of my soul, bringing my real self before the real God, and discovering prayer, as Simone Weil put it, as “absolute attention.”

This book is about attentiveness, not simply as a path to self-fulfillment but as the very essence of our journey to the Center—as the way home to our own heart, the way of making our heart a home for God. So I am writing for myself, to identify waymarks for my own second journey but also for others who are walking the path with Christ, or searching for the path to Christ, so we may walk it together.

I have noticed in my own experience how the vocational journey and the personal journey intertwine. What God is doing in both is similar, very much like the interweaving of the intricate strands in a Celtic cord, a work of art designed to show how God is at work weaving the inner and outer parts of our lives into a unified pattern.

In this “second journey” I have sensed a strong call to be an artist of the soul and a friend on the journey, especially to younger men and women, and others, who seek to be led by Jesus, to lead like him and to lead to him, and who have a hunger to be whole people.

Each of us is called to a life patterned by Christ. A life not shaped by inner compulsions, or captive to outer expectations, but drawn by the inner voice of love. To listen to this voice, we need to pay careful attention to where our inner and outer selves disconnect and where they need to come together in a beautiful pattern that reflects Jesus, whose inner life with his Father and outer life of ministering to others were very much one.

To walk this path home, and to be a companion to others on the journey, I need to learn both to be still and to go (or grow) deeper. T. S. Eliot wrote that “old men ought to be explorers. . . . We must be still and be moving.” I do not feel old yet! But I do realize that this life stage requires not so much doing for God as paying attention to what God is doing.

There are periods in which we are mostly active and outwardly focused. And there are times in which we become more reflective, when we move more from action to being acted upon. The latter time may well come as we get older. But this is not a book about aging; it is about learning how we may become more attuned to the still, small voice of God in all the seasons of our lives.

What Will We Pay Attention To?

In the rest of this book we will explore together various aspects of attentiveness as a special lens through which to look at our lives.

We will look at attentiveness itself: what is it, and why is it important?

We will see God as the Great Attender, the One who pays attention and calls us to attention.

We will look at the hours of our lives, whether the hours of our days (marked by the classical “prayer hours”) or the various seasons of life and our spiritual journey, and the kind of attentiveness that each phase calls for:

the “morning” journey, when our day starts and where our life begins with all its potential and challenges

the “midday” journey, when we are flung headlong into the busyness of life, which lures us onto the open road but may also engender a sense of having lost our way

the “afternoon” time, when we set out in earnest on an inner journey because we know we have limited time and are heading for home

the “evening” journey, the conscious transition from afternoon to the time when the shadows lengthen and evening falls, the time to find a way to live with a quieted soul

the “nighttime” journey, when by God’s grace all will be completed and we see darkness not as the terror of the unknown but as time to return to the great Mystery from which we set out, the final rest of our soul in God

In each chapter we will consider “one who paid attention,” discovering journeyers from centuries past and our own time who have learned to pay attention and can inspire us by their examples. And in the “Practicing Attentiveness” sections we will note some of the helpful practices that from ancient times and still today have helped pilgrims to pay attention.

The appendix includes a sampling of some of the prayers I have used, a collection to help me “recollect” God’s presence at the various hours of a day.

For me, discovering these new practices has not meant in the slightest jettisoning either the foundational beliefs or the spiritual disciplines that I have followed since my youth. It has meant exploring other ways: silence, stillness, art and poetry, reading Scripture not by going through great chunks but by meditating on smaller portions, listening carefully to God and my own heart, having a trusted spiritual companion as a friend on the journey.

This book is not meant to be a memoir, but it does come out of my calling to be an artist of the soul and a friend on the journey. As I seek to describe my own journey, I pray that I may be a friend traveling with you on the journey to the Friend.

There is one more thing to say: Paying attention is not a way by which we make something happen but a way to see what is already given to us. I have just reread Annie Dillard’s account of stalking the fish in Virginia. She reflects both on the ancient fish symbol (ichthus) which stands for Christ and the way in which Mediterranean people in his day depended on finding fish in order to live. “To say that holiness is a fish is a statement of the abundance of grace; it is the equivalent of saying in a materialistic culture that money does indeed grow on trees. ‘Not as the world gives do I give to you’; these fish are spirit food. And revelation is a study in stalking.”

I need very much to learn to pay attention. But it is not my perfect attention that brings grace. Grace opens my eyes as I wait so that I may see both Giver and gift, and be grateful.

Often during a recent Lent I prayed a prayer that our pastor suggested: “Lord, show me what I am missing.” Let us start this journey together where we are, with that prayer, and see what he shows us.

One Who Paid Attention

C. S. Lewis Looking Along a Beam

One day C. S. Lewisstood in a dark toolshed where he had gone to look for something. A broad beam of sunlight was slanting in through a crack in the top of the door. As he looked at the beam with the dust motes dancing and floating in it, the shaft of sunlight captured his full attention in the darkness.

Then he moved so that the beam was falling directly on his eye. Instantly the whole scene changed. Looking out through the opening above the door, he could see up through the green leaves moving on the trees to the blue sky beyond and, millions of miles away, the sun.

It came to him then that there are two ways of looking: looking at and looking along. “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam,” he wrote, “are very different experiences.”

Just so, he realized, there are two ways of looking at life: looking at the dancing and moving events, the happenings and surroundings of each day, and looking “sideways” so to speak, “along the beam”—to see not only what is happening but why, and what it is that gives meaning to the happenings of our lives.

It seems that God has made us with the capacity to look both “at” and “along” our lives, to see what is in front of us and what is beyond us, and to find that the two are not opposed ways of seeing but belong together. It is the bad fortune of our world to have separated the two, ever since the philosopher René Descartes posed a divide between mind and matter. His dualism has bedeviled us ever since. Many of us now assume that knowledge is either “scientific” and based on facts or “mystical” and based on fancy, and never the twain shall meet.

In contrast, C. S. Lewis says that Christianity is “the most materialistic” of all religions and that God must love material things: after all, he made them! We need again to heed his wisdom. True knowledge is found in the Word who became flesh, as we look both “at” and “along” the beams each and every day.

I hope that this book will help us to pay close attention both to the beams that surround us and to the Source that upholds us, in such a way that time and eternity, this world and the next, are always intersecting.

This knowledge from God and of God, and not just the experiments of the scientist or the intuitions of the mystic, will save us and transform our world.

1 Paying Attention

The Hours of Our Lives

Matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline—that your hours will pierce me with arrows and wounds of praise.

Luci Shaw

Time is not our enemy, nor is it a hostile place from which we must flee. It is a meeting place, a point of rendezvous with God.

Dorothy Bass, Receiving the Day

Seven times a day do I praise you.

Psalm 119:164

Long centuries ago a young poet recorded praise to God that rose up in his heart seven times a day. We can surmise that he was young, because the very long psalm he wrote (the longest of all the psalms) records the longing of a young man to keep his way pure by paying attention to the words of God.

Could it be that this young poet, like David the shepherd boy, was an outdoorsman—or possibly even David himself? If so we may imagine that he was accustomed to tell the time of day by observing the angle of the sun, and evening time by the rising of the moon.

In those long-ago days, time was measured by positions of the heavenly bodies, not by mechanical devices. The young poet marked the segments of his days by the seven times he stopped to lift praise to the Creator, whom he knew as the God who separated light from darkness, who called the light Day and the darkness Night.

This poet may have been one of the very first of our human race to observe specific hours of the day as times to lift up his heart in prayer: surely at dawn and midday and sunset, at the times he gave thanks for his food, and perhaps when he rose at night. Others whose stories are told in the Bible followed this example with their own set hours of prayer; Daniel, for example, knelt down three times a day to give thanks to God (Dan 6:10).

So “the hours” early became reminders to pay attention to God.

The Benedictine Hours

Centuries passed, and another young man began looking for a way to order his life toward God. Born in Italy in A.D. 480 to a noble Roman family, he was a student in Rome in his late teens when he became dismayed by the dissolute lives of his fellow students and gave up the wealth of his father’s house, desiring only to serve God.

Leaving Rome, he settled in a hill village about forty miles away and became part of a community of men who shared his view of life. Then for three years he lived as a hermit, alone in a cave by a lake, where it was reported that he was fed by ravens.

At last an abbot, impressed by his devotion, asked him to lead a nearby community. There this young man became a shepherd of souls, founded a monastery that became the center of his life’s work, and eventually became known as St. Benedict. He wrote a “rule of life,” a guideline we choose to regulate our lives in order to facilitate our spiritual growth. Benedict’s rule could be summed up in three words: “Pray and work.” The Benedictine Rule included his own version of “the hours.”

The hours were not a ritual to be mechanically observed. They were meant to be an attentive path leading to new vision. “Apertis oculis nostris,” Benedict said at the start of the Rule. “Let us open our eyes.”

The Divine Hours

The “divine hours” as traditionally practiced by religious orders usually include the following:

Vigils, about 3 a.m.Lauds, greeting the beginning of the dayPrime, the start of the day’s workTerce, the third hour, perhaps midmorningSext, middayNone, midafternoonVespers, as the day is over and evening comesCompline, when the day is complete and sleep begins

Benedict’s prayer hours began with Lauds in the morning and carried through Compline at the end of the day. His cycle became the widespread practice of the church through the centuries, a tradition that is carried on today especially in religious orders and communities and by clergy as part of public worship services.

My first experience of the hours came during a retreat at Mepkin Abbey, a lovely monastery in the low country of South Carolina. Growing up in the Protestant evangelical tradition, for many years before that I had been unaware of the hours. In more liturgically aware churches, on the other hand, the hours have sometimes been regarded as the obligation of the clergy and not for ordinary people. In fact Benedict wrote his Rule for laypeople, not clerics! His original purpose was not to organize an order of clerics but to provide a guide for ordinary laypeople who wanted a lifestyle of following Christ day to day.

While religious orders around the world observe these specified hours of prayer, originally they were meant to call all Christian believers to pay attention to God throughout their days—as was the case with the well-known Angelus at noontime. In the late Middle Ages, when printed books became widely available in Europe, there was a great production of beautifully illuminated manuscripts known as Books of Hours. Although written in Latin, they became bestsellers and were tremendously popular as prayer guides for the ordinary everyday people.

An Invitation to Practice the Hours

Observing the hours can be a helpful practice for us in learning to pay attention to God throughout our days. Further, the hours can also be an illuminating way to reflect on the seasons or passages of our lives. I invite you to explore with me as we pay attention to how God has been and is at work in each of the “hours” we have lived.

Our word hour goes back to the Greek word hora, which, David Steindl-Rast points out, originally meant more than a unit of time. It was “not a numerical measure,” he writes, “but a soul measure.” Isn’t it true that we usually think of the seasons of the year less in terms of the dates they begin and end than in terms of their effect on us: the cold of winter, the awakening of spring, the glow of summer, the pathos of autumn leaves falling? All these seasons speak deeply to our inner life. Just so we may think of hours as seasons of our life—the passages of our soul.

The most vital way to measure our lives is not by chronological time—chronos time, to use the Greek word—but in terms of kairos, the word often used in the Bible to speak of those opportune times that become turning points. Kairos is the word Jesus often used when he said, “My time is not yet,” or “My time has come.” To be fully alive is to pay attention to kairos encounters. As Paul wisely counseled his readers, “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil” (Eph 5:15-16 NIV).

I like to think of the attentive life also as the contemplative life, for contemplative literally means “putting together.” We connect the dots between the chronos and the kairos of our life, relate the hours that we measure by the clock to the hours and seasons of our soul.

Out of years of frustration as I tried and often failed to pay closer attention to God day to day, I have developed my own version of the hours. It is becoming a way to rein in my wandering mind and to weave together the inner and outer threads of my life. For me, observing the hours has become less a discipline to keep and more a reminder to be aware of God’s presence in whatever I am doing and wherever I am. You might say it is a kind of UPS—Universal Positioning System. For a recent Christmas I even asked my son-in-law for a watch with timer and bells, which I set to remind me at certain hours to stop, remember and pray!

Pay Attention

From the time we were children we were told to “pay attention,” as if this were the simplest thing in the world. But in fact attentiveness is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp and one of the hardest disciplines to learn. For we are very distractible people in a very distracting world.

God wants us to be attentive people, as he is an attentive God. Many of the words of God in the Bible call his people to “look,” “see,” “listen,” “give heed.” Jesus (as paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message) said in his Sermon on the Mount, “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now” (Mt 6:34).

The influential French writer Simone Weil believed that attention is the very heart of prayer, and her French forebear Blaise Pascal also felt that inattention is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life. Their conviction, which is also that of many spiritual teachers through the ages, deserves our careful attention. Our world distracts us in many ways. Yet attentiveness, as I have come to see, is most critical for us to find the way to clarity of heart, and clarity is the path to seeing God, who is the source and end of all our longing.

“Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus—we could translate this saying as “Blessed are the clear at center”—“for they shall see God.” Such is the promise for those whose hearts—their personal centers—are directed toward God.

Moses was one who paid attention. In the desert, having fled from Pharaoh’s court, out tending his sheep, he saw a bush that was burning but did not burn up. “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” he said. “When the LORD saw that he had turned aside . . . God called to him” (Ex 3:3-4). That desert place became holy ground where Moses heard God’s call to save his people from slavery in Egypt.

The “burning bushes” in our path are signs planted in our life, opportunities to listen and pay attention. How often does God put signs out that we miss because our life is filled with so much stuff?

Long after Moses’ burning bush encounter, he was summoned with the elders of Israel to meet God on Mount Sinai. The book of Exodus contains a magnificent description of what they saw. Under God’s feet appeared “something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness” (Ex 24:10). In my inner eye I picture a clear expanse of open blue sky and imagine the greatness of God, for whom the sky, metaphorically, is a pavement on which he walks, with the clearness of heaven bringing clarity to the very rocks of the earth.

When Jesus was transfigured, that same clarity of light made his clothes blaze with a bright whiteness, brighter than any launderer could make them, as the voice of the Father told the disciples: “This is my Son, the Beloved; . . . listen to him” (Mt 17:5).

This is the clarifying light that I seek: to be “clear at center” and so with true attentiveness “to see God in all things, and all things in God.”

Paying Attention to the Other

Attentiveness means respecting, attending to, waiting on, looking at and listening to the other—the persons and things that we encounter—for what they are in themselves, not what we can make of them. We are called to pay attention to the Other—our Creator God—to know and worship him.

Paradoxically, attentiveness may be just the opposite of “fixing our attention.” Instead it involves a letting go of our usual need to control, an opening of ourselves to what we are being told or shown.

Our instinct is to hold on.

Elia Kazan said of the poet Sylvia Plath that “the world for Sylvia Plath only existed for her to write about.” Plath paid attention to her work and her words, but the possessiveness that consumes is the opposite of the attentiveness that frees and transforms.

During one of my retreats at Mepkin Abbey, I wanted to do a watercolor painting, and after several days I selected a large spreading oak tree to serve as my subject. I spent an hour or two painting plein air. The next day as I was leaving, a regret stabbed me: I realized I had treated that tree only as an object for me to paint, had not really attended to it as a tree made by God and beautiful in itself. In a penitential mood, I turned my car, drove back to where that tree stood, and (hoping no one else was looking) walked up to the tree, put my arms as far around it as I could reach, and asked God to help me to honor the tree as valuable for what he had made it to be, not just how useful it was to me!

Sin, as Augustine defines it, is to be incurvatus in se—curved in on oneself. The Quaker writer Douglas Steere defined sin as inattention. “For prayer is awakeness, attention, intense inward openness. In a certain way sin could be described . . . [as] anything that destroys this attention.” Salvation—true freedom—is just the opposite of sin, turning us out to the reality of the created world of which we are a part, and to the Creator who calls us to be attenders.

The God Who Pays Attention

Friends (and some not-so-friendly persons) are always e-mailing stuff that I didn’t ask for and usually don’t want. Most often I just hit delete. But one forwarded message insisted I pull it up. In astonishment I watched “The Powers of Ten,” a series of images showing our galaxy from the most distant reaches to one of the tiniest particles of our earth.

Beginning with images of the Milky Way ten million light-years from the Earth, it moved through space in successive leaps through our solar system to the orbits of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, to our earth and the Western Hemisphere, down to the southeastern United States and to Tallahassee, Florida. At Tallahassee it zoomed in to the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, then to a tall oak tree, followed successively by the surface of a leaf measuring one millimeter, to one cell of the leaf at 100 nanometers, to a strip of DNA, down through the atoms that make up the leaf to a single proton, and finally ended with the tiniest particle, a quark measuring 100 atometers.

Awesome! That was the only word that came to mind. I had just seen the world from the tiniest bit out to the edge of our galaxy ten million light years off!

When our granddaughter Christine came by on her way home from high school, I showed her the “Powers of Ten,” and she was as awestruck as I was.

“Do you think we have just had a small glimpse of the way God sees things? Close up and distant, all in a moment?” I asked.

“I think so,” she nodded.

Of course, if God is really there (and here), then what took the highest-powered microscopes and telescopes (and the Internet) for Christine and me to view for a moment—a reality millions of light-years old—God has had in view totally, instantly, constantly since creation itself exploded into being.

It is a mind- and heart-boggling thought, but not a new one. Centuries ago the writer of Psalm 8 (presumably David the shepherd boy who had spent many nights in the fields looking after sheep and gazing at the stars) wrote:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Ps 8:3-4)

Christine and I can now see our world in dimensions both tinier and huger than David could have dreamed of. But in the light of the “powers of ten”—the powers of scientific observation—perhaps the question has changed from “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” to “If the universe is so huge, why should we think that God would pay attention to us anyway?”

Many in the generation of Christine’s parents (and grandparents) assume that the picture of God as the Shepherd of our souls and of the stars is a quaint relic of a romantic worldview long ruled out by science.

The great new truth is that the perspective of science has changed. The belief that science rules out God is itself now quaint! And Christine’s peers are part of a generation seeking to know God in a deep and personal way.

The God Who Attends to Us

The story of the Bible is not merely the story of a deity who launched the cosmos and then turned his attention elsewhere. Quite the contrary: it reveals a God who is mindful, who keeps paying attention, whose mind does not wander! He is a Father who watches with careful attention.

This is the very nature of God, and a truth that touches the deepest longings of our lives.

Bilquis Sheikh, a Muslim woman, was brought to faith in Christ by coming to know God as a loving Father. She describes the moment after a long search when this truth seized her imagination: “A breakthrough of hope flooded me. Suppose God were like a father? If my earthly father would put aside everything to listen to me, why wouldn’t my heavenly Father do the same?”

She went to her knees and reached over to a bedside table where she kept both the Bible and the Qur’an. Lifting them, one in each hand, she prayed: “ ‘Which, Father? Which one is Your Book?’ And then a remarkable thing happened. . . . I heard a voice inside my being, a voice . . . full of kindness, yet at the same time full of authority. And the voice said, ‘In which book do you meet Me as your Father?’ ‘In the Bible.’ That’s all it took.”

The Qur’an that Muslims read uses many respectful terms to speak of the greatness of God. But it has no name for God as Father. For the devout Muslim to associate God with human beings in an intimate and personal way is to commit the sin of “shirk”—of associating God with what is not God. Yet a friend in Cairo has told me that his Muslim friends are deeply touched when he promises to pray to God for their needs—the Father who, as Bilquis Sheikh wrote, would “put aside everything to listen to me.”

The Mindfulness of God

This God creates, playfully, purposefully—out of nothing—space and stars, sun and moon, light and darkness, dandelions and donkeys, whales and kingfishers, and a handsome couple. And then he doesn’t get bored: he sees everything he has made and takes delight in it. And instead of standing at a distance, he comes to visit his creatures in a garden in the cool of the evening.

But things don’t go happily ever after. Still, when Adam and Eve are not mindful of him and the good boundaries he has set, he doesn’t walk away and wash his hands. He walks in the spoiled garden and calls “Where are you?”—still paying attention.

Later he does wash the whole world he made with a flood. But even then he is paying attention, starting the creation all over again with one man and his family and an ark like a menagerie of animals. Not one escapes his attention!

The story goes on. He pays attention to one nomad, Abraham, and makes him a father of nations. Pays attention to the cries of slaves, and makes Moses pay attention to a burning bush so he will heed the call to lead them out.

And this God looks with insight as well as sight. Why does God choose David as the king of Israel? While the people choose leaders because they look attractive on the outside, God looks on “the heart.” He sees that this shepherd lad, who pays attention to stars and sheep, also knows that “the eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and his ears are attentive to their cry” (Ps 34:15 NIV).

Fast-forward through the centuries. Wayward as his people are, God never stops paying attention, until he comes up with the biggest attention-getter of all. The lens of the story moves in from wide-angle to close-up. It zooms in on one unmarried virgin, who listens with her heart when the angel Gabriel comes to tell her that God is paying special attention to her.

And he pays attention quietly. His son is born not in a palace with fanfare and flares across the evening sky but in a manger, in the stillness of a Middle Eastern night.

We all know there is a difference between people who pay attention to us, which we all want deeply, and those who force their attentions on us, which something in us resists strongly. God pays, not demands, attention. And yet the greatest wonder of all is that when we ignore him, he still longs for, yearns for, our attention.

Jesus told the story of a landowner whose tenant farmers do not pay attention to their work or to him, who refuse to pay him what they owe. The landowner sends messengers to ask them to pay up, but they beat and shamefully treat them. Finally he sends his own son, sure they will respect this final gesture. But shamefully, they seize and kill the son.