God Watching Day 17

"Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now." Matthew 6:34a
The Message

This month of watching what God is doing is more than half over already. And so far it's all been pretty amazing. As I suspected at the beginning, by focusing more of my attention on what God is doing in my life, I am seeing more of what God is doing in my life, or is it that I am am seeing more of what is going on in my life as God's doing? I know I have felt that strange tension between my logic brain and my faith heart a lot more intensely in the last seventeen days. It's kind of funny. When I was little my goals in life were to be "smart and holy." As a little Catholic kid this seemed to be the recipe for success somehow. Now this seems to be these two parts of myself trying to find some way to live in peaceful coexistence. I have always been able to trade on smart. When nothing else could be trusted I had my brain. Thinking never failed. If I could understand it I owned it. For a long time I pretty much lived in my safe head. The world of emotions and human relationships was too weird and scary. The relationships I did have were in my head too...with characters in books, with imaginary friends, and guardian angels, with the Virgin Mary who I talked to daily for several years during grade school. But at some point, of course, "logic" took over, and I came to understand that these things could not be "real." Things that were real were things that could be touched, or seen or at least explained in neat and rational ways. And most of the things of God and the Spirit do not fit this model. Therefore I had no explanation for the feeling that came over me when a voice that was not my own was "talking with" me as a real and living presence during a high school retreat. Or when I read de Chardin and he talked about God as a still point and I knew in a very visceral way what he meant. No, not logic, not something that quantifies neatly, something far more, deeper and greater.... something, someone... that lived and called me, drew and and pulled me in. Someone who for a long time scared me to death. Logic, after all was so much safer.

I don't know how things work, how God works. Is is simple coincidence that in this very difficult time in my life that I decide "just on a whim" that now is the time I need to use Pray as You Go to spice up my morning prayer routine and I hear just exactly the thing I need to hear, that a client tells me of a book he is reading and it is just the thing I need to read right now, that I get this extra week of unwanted waiting and it turns out to be full of gifts so incredible they literally take my breath away? Or is it God fully alive and fully at work? Logic brain (and even my more "sophisticated theological self") would sometimes say it's just random and I am imposing meaning. But, you know, I simply cannot go there anymore. It just does not feel like randomness. It feels like love. It feels so exactly like the kind of thing even we simple silly humans do for one another when we are at our best....reaching out and offering something that will comfort and inspire, hold up and ease...and well, if we can do this for one another, well, why couldn't it be the God in whose image after all we were created?