Rejoicing in Rest

 

Rest is a four-letter word to most of us, whether we admit it or not. It is such a foreign concept to those of us in western culture that we don’t really believe it’s possible. I can back that up with a couple of real-life examples.

Years ago, I was the teacher for a young adult Sunday school class. The class was mostly young professionals, without children, and some who were in law school or medical school. We were using a book that explored different spiritual practices. There was no pushback against the ideas of prayer or fasting or service or generosity or even silence. But when we got to sabbath, you’d have thought I was suggesting sacrificing animals on the sanctuary altar! We looked at the scriptures in Leviticus about a sabbath year. I asked the class, “Could you go an entire year without working, trusting that God would provide what you needed?” The outrage was swift and loud. I heard the phrase “Protestant work ethic” and comments about God’s expectation for us to work. I could testify that among that group, there were no young adults willing to be slackers!

Yet the aversion to sabbath was just as strong among a group of retirees I later led through a book study using Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World. All was well until we hit the chapter on sabbath. When I asked this group if they could go an entire day (not a year, just one day) without working, or making anyone or anything else (even their car or phone or computer) work, the pushback was just as strong as what I’d encountered in the young adult class.

We act as if rest would kill us.

Rest is an anathema to us. A last resort. Something we often only do when our bodies break down and insist on it.

Imagineifeverythingwewrotewaswrittenwithoutspacesorpunctuationhowwouldyoubeabletoeasilyreadanydocument? We use spaces to understand the written word. We use punctuation to convey the emotion of a message. If there are no pauses, if every word is run together, how long before you actually get frustrated and give up trying to read a document?

Pauses, rests in musical notation, punctuation—all of these are needed to convey an understandable message. If our lives are a message to God, if we seek to live lives that are praising God, how will our praise be understood if our lives are simply one thing after another without any pause? Jesus rested. Even in the press of people seeking healing, he took time away to renew himself. When we refuse to rest, we are actually saying with our lives that we are better than Jesus.

I do not have this all worked out in my life. It’s a constant challenge for me to accept the gift of rest. A recent move, which has given me a more open schedule, has caused me to confront my own discomfort with rest. I am continually reminding myself that I don’t have to fill every empty moment with activity. The struggle is real, and I keep telling myself that “no” is an acceptable answer.

Rest will not kill us. On the contrary, we need to learn to rejoice in rest. To gladly do nothing, to dispel any guilt or shame at being “nonproductive.” Who knows what might change for us if we simply spent an afternoon or even fifteen minutes watching clouds or sitting by a stream? To make the time to simply enjoy being alive and part of the world—what an act of praise to God!

Moving Toward Purity of Heart: The Practice of Lectio Divina

Today I talk about a way of reading scripture for transformation rather than information.

Restlessness (aka Acedia)

Restlessness is not unique to us in the midst of a pandemic. It's been around a long time, and we can learn how to combat it from early church leaders.

It's Okay to Rest

Maybe we would be more inclined to rest if we viewed it as a spiritual discipline.

A Yoke of Gentleness

Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves.

                                                                                                                                Matthew 11:29

To focus on this one verse helps me to see it differently. Jesus invites us to learn his way of gentleness and humility. When we focus on striving to better ourselves, to win over others, to prove ourselves right, worthy, smart, capable and adept, we will inevitably come up short at some time. There is a limit beyond which our faculties and milieu will not let us go.

We mostly live our lives trying to be superhuman. Our culture encourages it. Perfection, at least in what is visible to others, is the goal. But it is a goal we cannot reach. We dress our family for the perfect family photo and struggle to find one where everyone appears happy. We set a table for the perfect family meal and then the bread gets too brown on the bottom or the dog licks the ham and we can either come unglued or remember that life is not perfect.

In so many scenes of our life—at work, at church, in the community—we envision scenarios where everything goes smoothly, only to experience that they don’t. Real life does not look like perfection.

Jesus’ offer to be gentle and humble begins with ourselves. When we can let go of the superhuman image of ourselves that we strive to present to others and even to ourselves, and can accept our dents and scratches and let these be visible to others, then we can learn to rest.

While we may strive for exterior perfection, the perfection to which Jesus calls us is wholeness, completeness, the fullness of our humanity.

Thomas Merton said that to be a saint is to be who you are. How do we come to know ourselves wholly, deeply, clearly so that we become more fully human? Jesus invites us to a way of gentleness and humility, so we can begin to see the self that God sees and loves. Not an outwardly perfect self, but a self created in the image of God that gives voice to the unique melody God has placed in each of us. When we sing that melody, we grow more fully human n the way God created us to be. To know ourselves more fully allows us to know God more fully.

Bath

Another reflection arising from a slow, deliberate reading through 1 John.

God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.   ---1 John 4:16b

I want to remain in the refreshing

bath of your love

until I feel it work all the way

through me—stickiness

of hurt soaked into the

softness of mercy, ache

of suffering soothed and transformed

into the replenishing

balm of wisdom. I emerge,

shriveled fingers and toes, from your

healing water

carrying with me

the cleansing grace

of your love.

Freedom From Fear

For our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is naturally rooted in God in endless love.    ---Julian of Norwich

To read the writings of Julian of Norwich is to read of the depths of God’s love for us. It’s hard to come away from her work without a sense of peace that dispels fear and anxiety about our relationship with God.

While we don’t know Julian’s real name (the name we have for her is the name of the church in which she lived as an anchoress—St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England), her recording of a series of visions given her by God is powerful because it provides us with an image of God as loving and merciful.

Consider the quote I’ve shared above. If you spend time reflecting on this, really allowing it to sink into your mind and heart, it is hard to not be filled with a sense of peace and an assurance of God’s presence and love for us. Words from one of John’s epistles come to mind: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18).

We can grow to a more mature faith in God when we move beyond fear of punishment and can allow our souls to simply rest in God, knowing that God loves us abundantly and endlessly. When we are not afraid, we become open to know that God IS love because we fall headlong into the endless love God has for us.

I encourage you to take some time this and reflect on Julian’s quote. Maybe copy it and put it somewhere that you will see during the day. It is a gift to your soul to find rest in God. 

Home

John 1:1-5, 14a

Home—not a building, but

relationship. You made your

home among us. Though you had

no place to lay your head,

you were at home with us.

Home, likewise, is for me relationship,

for when I had no place to rest

I found my home in you.

Be Still

Psalm 46

When all around me shakes,

keep me, hold me that I may be

unshaken in your hands,

able to see with nonanxious

clearness, with steady heart

that you are God

and I am not, so I can

be still in my soul.

Over vs Through

I bought an Italian Parsley plant a few weeks ago. I put the pot in a sunny window, gave it water, and hoped it would thrive there. I snipped leaves off for several recipes that first week.

All seemed to be going well with my little plant until I returned from a weekend retreat. Yellow leaves greeted me on my arrival, even though there was still water in the dish under the pot. I got the scissors and began to trim the dying leaves, which took almost all the leaves off the plant. I wasn’t sure the plant would survive.

But just a couple of days later, I noticed lots of new leaves. The severe pruning allowed the plant to be healthy and grow. Had I simply repotted the sick plant, or just continued to water it, without any pruning, I am convinced it would have died completely.  

That little plant reminds me that avoidance of difficulty, or glossing over one’s pain (think Monty Python—“It’s only a flesh wound”) does not create the opportunity for growth that going through difficulty, enduring the pruning, or feeling the loss makes for us.

When we are seriously wounded, healing takes time and attention. You wouldn’t tell someone with a broken leg to just get over it. The leg has to be set, protected and immobilized, so the bones can knit back together. The inner wounds of bullying, betrayal or rejection are no different. Wounds take time and attention to heal. Ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist is just as unhealthy as wallowing in self-pity.

A friend told me that cancer was the best thing to happen to her. She let go of her go-go pace, allowed her body to rest, and spent time with God. Her spiritual growth through the process of chemotherapy was tremendous, and she is a different person now—filled with a peace and wisdom that only time, reflection and stillness can bring. She told me how she felt sad watching others who, while undergoing chemotherapy, tried to maintain their lifestyle at the same level of activity as before their treatment. She said they missed the gift that their treatment offered—to go deeper with God. They were focused on getting over cancer. My friend focused on going through.

To go through, we have to let go. We have to relinquish our timetable, our sense of control. When we go through loss, pain and wounding, when we allow the pain to teach us, we learn that there is much we no longer need. Pruning makes space for something new, something that cannot grow without enduring the difficult.

Jesus fully went through his suffering. He drank it, without any self-pity, to the last drop. He died, the ultimate pruning, but he rose from the dead. And how did the disciples know for sure it was him? Because he rose with his wounds. He bore the scars in his resurrected body, a constant reminder of the suffering he endured.

Jesus, my parsley plant, and my friend remind me of the gift of going through, of allowing the pain to give us new life.

The Power of Withdrawing

Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit . . .

                                                                Luke 4:14a

After forty days in the wilderness, Jesus emerges with power, ready to begin his ministry. I think about the preparation that his time in the wilderness gave him. Would we ever think of withdrawing as a way to access power? I have heard many people say they were fearful that if they took time away from the activities (be it work, volunteer service or recreation) they would be forgotten, deemed nonessential, or would lose the discipline to show up.

Withdrawal seems so passive to us, and most of us don’t like to be passive. I remember several years ago hearing someone say he did not want to call a retreat by that name. Instead he wanted to use the word “advance.” Advance does sound more assertive than retreat, and we might think that advancing would make us more powerful. Withdrawing or retreating, stepping out of the fray of daily activity, may not seem like the way to power.

Our cultural tendency to grit our teeth and push forward as if we are superhuman is not the way of Jesus. If we want to follow Jesus, we have to cease our breakneck pace of life. We have to move with intention and attention. We have to stop, rest, withdraw and pray. To receive the power of the Spirit requires that we lay aside our own notions of power, our tendency to take matters into our own hands.

To follow Jesus, not run ahead of Jesus, requires that we trust that the Spirit will empower us, that we can withdraw, wait and rest, setting aside our arrogant notions of how things should be and instead entrusting God with our being and doing.

It is why following Jesus is so hard for us. We have to follow, not lead!

Christ's Generous Fullness

From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace

                                                                                                                John 1:16

 Fullness. In the midst of Christmas celebrations, many of us know about fullness. Full schedules, full houses, full stomachs, even full trash cans as boxes and wrapping paper are discarded.

Yet all these are temporary, fleeting expressions of fullness. In fact, they distract us from the Source of true fullness, the Word who became flesh and made his home among us. What our hearts hunger for is not another piece of pie, or more activities or the latest gadget, but this grace upon grace that John can hardly describe. Words are inadequate to capture the utter richness of who Jesus is and what he longs to give to us.

I recall a prayer I heard once, offered by Sister Kathleen Flood at a 5-Day Academy for Spiritual Formation. She prayed, asking God to forgive us for being content with crumbs when God wants to give us the entire loaf. And this is what we do far too often—we grab crumbs, holding onto moldy, dry crumbs when a warm, fragrant, freshly baked loaf is offered to us. Whether we think we are unworthy for such a gift, cannot be vulnerable enough to be a recipient rather than a giver, or simply cannot trust that God loves us so generously, we turn down treasure and hold onto trash.

We choose crumbs whenever we choose fear over love, when we are more concerned with security than with generosity, when we struggle to meet expectations rather than relaxing into freedom to be who God created us to be. We especially do it at Christmas when we substitute shopping, food and materialism—dry crumbs—for the freshness that comes with realizing that we are sons and daughters of God, uniquely loved by our Creator.

Only a few recognized or understood Jesus when he lived among us in skin. Even today, many do not understand that Jesus came to set us free from fear, from imprisoning rules and expectations. Jesus came to show us what love is, in all its warmth, freshness and fragrant goodness. There is no end to his grace and love. It is we who choose to live in scarcity, to eat crumbs.

St. Catherine of Siena expresses the abundance, the fullness of grace in this short poem:

We know nothing until we know everything.

I have no object to defend

for all is of equal value

to me.

I cannot lose anything in this

place of abundance

I found.

If something my heart cherishes

is taken away,

I just say, “Lord, what

happened?”

And a hundred more

appear.

Living in the fullness of grace upon grace, we don’t have to subsist on crumbs, living as if love is a scarce possession. Love begets love, generosity begets generosity and grace is unending and abundant, a fragrant, limitless loaf!

Advent Stillness

Stillness does not come easily to most of us. It is hard enough to be still on the outside, but just try to sit still for even five minutes and you’ll likely find that your mind’s activity is making you as tired as if you were actually moving physically.

Our culture devalues stillness, equating it with a lack of productivity. We’ve lost touch with the concept of fallowness, the practice of allowing a field to rest, so that it can be renewed. When a field lies fallow, it is then better able to provide the goodness seeds need for growth. In this season of winter, we see the bare limbs of a tree and know that even though it appears that nothing is happening, the tree is being made ready for spring’s new growth. Nature can teach us about stillness.

I struggle to be still. I know the value of stillness, but the mindset that activity equates to productivity is so culturally ingrained that it takes great discipline to overcome it and invite stillness. Last Sunday afternoon I chose to sit outside in the yard rather than take a walk. Walking feels more productive to me than sitting, but my spirit was renewed as I felt the gentle breeze on my skin, listened to the birds sing and watched the lengthening shadows fall across the yard.

Waiting and watching—Advent words that we are often too harried to embody—speak to me of fallowness, a stillness pregnant with meaning. In this stillness I let go of the false notion that what God wants most is my activity and realize that it is my heart that God longs for, a heart softened by stillness, a heart prepared to be the birthplace of Christ.

The Violence of Busyness

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

                                                                ---Thomas Merton

I come back to the quote time and again as a touchstone to remind me not to get caught up in the frenzy of busyness, which occurs as much in the church as it does in life outside the church.

If the Kingdom of God is characterized by peace and love, a church that gets carried away by our culture’s fast pace is a violent church, not a representation of the Kingdom of God.

When the church fails to model a rhythm of work and rest, service and Sabbath, community breaks down. Wayne Muller, in his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives, says that our lack of rest and reflection means that when we solve problems, “we do so frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly. . . In the soil of a quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable. . . When we are moving faster and faster, every encounter, every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is, and we react with sloppy desperation.”

I have seen the destruction that happens when people try to do too much too fast. People are hurt, and as Muller says, the quick fix mentality breeds new, and often worse, problems. Living with a frantic urgency is not the way Jesus lived. Jesus looked at and listened to people. Even when he was beckoned to save the life of a child, he was so in tune with his inner wisdom that he could feel someone touch his robe for healing (Luke 8:40-56). He did not get in a hurry.

Wisdom does not come from consuming more knowledge and experiences. Wisdom is born and grows in silence, solitude and Sabbath. When we honor our need for rest, we allow God to be God for us. When we act as though we cannot rest, that we must be always involved in frantic activity, we say by our busyness that we do not trust God to act. And when we have, even implicitly, decided that we must act for God, it is only a small step to the violence that leads to decisions and actions that hurt instead of heal others.

The Necessity for Silence

We are a culture that does not value silence. We are bombarded by noise, be it music, television chatter, mechanical sounds or podcasts. It is hard to find silent space in our lives, and for many, silence is uncomfortable. We are so used to constant noise that we don’t know what to do with the rare occasions that there is a void of noise.

I believe one reason we fail to appreciate silence is that it seems unproductive. If we are driving the car and keeping up with the news, or returning phone calls or having our emails read to us by our smart devices, we feel efficient and productive. At the very least, if we aren’t working while driving, we can entertain ourselves with music or podcasts.

The same pattern is repeated in other venues: doctors’ offices, restaurants and airports—even walking down the street. I walk in the early morning and enjoy the songs of birds that signal to me the world is waking up to another day, but many of my neighbors who are walking at the same time don’t hear the birds or other nature sounds because they have their headphones in their ears. I don’t know what they are listening to, but I have to wonder if it is as renewing as the morning sounds of birds, bugs and wind in the trees.

Silence for me is more than simply an absence of noise. It is accompanied by an inner stillness that is essential to being fully present where I am. Silence creates pauses in our lives, allowing us to catch our breath, to remember who we are and whose we are, to reclaim the peace for which we are made. But silence is usually not forced on us or encouraged by our surroundings. We have to want to be silent. We have to seek silence. We have to be intentional about carving out time and space for silence.

I read a line in a book recently that contrasted the spiritual life with a life lived without consciousness. To think that the opposite of living a spiritual life is living a life without consciousness shows me the importance of silence. When our lives are filled with noise, we end up living lives without consciousness. Thomas Merton spoke of the mindlessness of Muzak and how, even if we had to be in places filled with noise, recognizing our yearning for silence keeps us open to be renewed. In contrast, if we are numbed to the noise around us, and have no desire for something different, we cannot be renewed.

Like a field that needs to lie fallow so that depleted nutrients can be restored, we need silence for our own spiritual restoration. 

Cedar Waxwings

In the fall and again in the spring, cedar waxwings migrate through our area. And every fall and spring, I get excited by the prospect of their visit. I walk looking up when I hear their gentle peeping, craning my neck to find them. They are such elegant, sleek birds, made all the more special because they aren’t permanent residents here.

Yesterday, the space outside my office window was aflutter with them. They flew back and forth from tree to tree, feeding on the abundant holly berries in our church courtyard. In our prayer room down the hall the hollies cover the window and I stood watching for almost half an hour as the cedar waxwings flew in and out of the bushes, feasting on the berries. I thought about the passage from Matthew where Jesus uses the birds as his example of how God provides what we need:

Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? (Matthew 6:25-26)

When you really stop and think about cedar waxwings or any bird, it’s hard not to be amazed. They know what they need to survive and thrive, and, if we don’t mess things up for them, they have food and shelter. Many are decked out in incredible colors and patterns, and if that were not enough, their songs are their praise to the One Who provides for them.

May birds remind us all of God’s abundant love for us and for all creation. May we in turn thank God by trusting God and by caring for all that God has made and entrusted to us. And may we rest in God’s provision, taking a cue from cedar waxwings to feast on the life God has given to us.

Feeding on Silence

I am discovering that, more than food, I need silence. This was especially apparent to me on a recent silent retreat. While only away for two nights, my soul was nourished in a way that simply does not happen in my normal rhythm of life, even with a regular habit of daily silence.

“Need” may seem like a strong word, but it is deliberately chosen. I know that such times of retreat are needed for my life, for my spirit to grow inside me and become my whole life, filling in every crack and crevice and pushing out anything that claims to be other than my spiritual life.

Thomas Merton says, in Thoughts in Solitude, “The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”

Silence is for me, and I believe for all of us, necessary for that spiritual life to be lived. Silence helps us to strip away those false gods that compete for our attention, that demand we live noisy, scattered, complicated lives so we will feel we are really “worth” something. In silence, I have come to know that the only thing, the only thing that can satisfy my desire for worth is God’s love for me. In silence, I can hear God call me Beloved.

Silence, paradoxically, has moved me from certainty about many things religious, to uncertainty about much of what I hear other Christians shout with great certainty. Silence, though, has made me certain about what I believe is the one thing needful: to know I am a loved and forgiven child of God.

Engorged and Empty

I don’t know where it began—this notion that we need more. Maybe it was cable TV, when we went from three channels to hundreds. Maybe it was all-you-can-eat buffets. Or maybe it arose with mass production. However it began, we live in an age of choice, of muchness, of endless options.

Years ago, when my children were small, one of them told me about a toy he wanted for Christmas. My husband and I went to a big-box toy store to buy the requested item. When we found the aisle where the requested toy was sold, we were greeted with so many choices that we didn’t know which one to buy.

At the grocery store where I most often shop, soft drink choices line both sides of an aisle. Sometimes my husband and I sit down to watch TV for a short time and spend so much time scrolling through the available programs that we find it’s bedtime before we can figure out what to watch. I can’t even listen to all the songs on my iPod, so I cannot imagine what I’d do with Spotify. And when I broke my hand last week I even got to choose the color of my cast.

A few weeks ago our pastor spoke in his sermon of the tension between the desire for more and the sufficiency of enough. In a society where we are inundated with choices in everything from potato chips to cast colors, why are we still so dissatisfied? Why are so many people angry, unhappy and miserable?

I have just come off two months of a very full schedule. While the items on my calendar were all good, I felt as though I was drinking from a fire hose—too many events, too much food, and too little quiet. I am part of a small group that is studying spiritual disciplines this fall. All the calendar activity wound down about the same time that we came to the chapter on fasting. As the author described how fasting makes us light, joyful and pure, I thought of how tired, heavy and unfocused I felt. I actually began to look forward to less—less food, less noise and fewer events.

With all the choices I have available to me every day, what nourishes my soul is the intentional choice to avoid the barrage of options I have for stimulation that keep me living at the surface of life. Instead, I need to open a space within for Christ. I want to be content with the sufficiency of God.

The Grace of Self-Forgetfulness

And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.               Matthew 22:39                                                      

Likely you are familiar with this verse, for it appears in some form in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is not original with Jesus, though, for it first appears in Leviticus 19:18. As easy as the verse is to remember, it is not easy to practice. We have as hard a time loving our neighbor as we do loving self.

I have been reading Abandonment to Divine Providence
 by Rev. Jean-Pierre de Caussade S.J., which is a treatise on the sacrament of the present moment and a collection of letters to different people encouraging them to self-abandonment. Over and over again, de Caussade encourages the recipients of his letters to be gentle with themselves. He says that just as they treat others with gentleness and patience, they should extend the same treatment to themselves. 

We may balk at such instruction, but I believe that is because we equate self-love with self-indulgence. On the contrary, while de Caussade encourages gentleness toward self, he also urges the recipients of his letters to not be self-absorbed but instead to be self-forgetful. If we are beating ourselves up over our failures and inadequacies, we are exhibiting self-absorption. Being gentle and patient with ourselves, letting our failures drop like a stone in water, is actually self-forgetfulness. Far from self-indulgence, such patience recognizes that we are going to fail. That acknowledgement and acceptance of our limitations increases our dependence on God, de Caussade observes.

Gentleness with ourselves translates into gentleness with others. And when we accept that others will also fail, we can love them for who they are, failures and all. Such acknowledgment allows us to forgive others as we are also forgiven. In this gentleness and patience with ourselves and others, we can find rest for our souls.

God: Good to the Last Drop

If you stray to the right or the left, you will hear a word that comes from behind you: “This is the way; walk in it.”                                                                                                              Isaiah 30:21

Isn’t this what we crave from God if we are seeking to live a faithful life? I know people who have heard God speak and I am grateful for the occasions when I have heard a direction from God. If I am to hear such a word from God, a word that gives direction to my path, I cannot cram my life full of my own agenda. God’s word comes to me as a gift I receive by slowing down, doing one thing at a time and living with full attention devoted the task at hand.

One of the unexpected fruits of accepting the Lenten challenge to drink only water as our beverage has been the appreciation I now have for a cup of coffee. Prior to Lent, drinking coffee was often a mindless exercise, a habitual practice that failed to get much of my attention. Sure, I like smelling the freshly ground beans or the freshly brewed coffee. On a cold morning, I looked forward to a cup of hot coffee upon returning from my morning walk. But when I drank it, I usually was also doing something else and the coffee was not the center of my attention.

Slowing down to appreciate my coffee actually helps me pay attention to God. Chris Seay, in the book A Place at the Table, calls what we chose to give up for Lent “extravagances.” To think of coffee as an extravagance has given me a new appreciation for it. He challenges us to remember that all we are given to eat and drink is a gift, a miracle from the hand of God.

To drink a cup of coffee with attention and appreciation is a sacred act of worship and this discipline of doing one thing at a time heightens my ability to hear a word from God. Being fully present in the present moment allows me to see things I would otherwise miss, and prepares my mind and heart to be fertile soil for the word that God wants to plant there. Both literally and figuratively, I can taste and see that the Lord is good!