I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I can live with a greater awareness of God’s presence even in the very ordinary, mundane, moments of life.
Frederick Buechner wrote,
The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak — even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.
We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fulness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement.
He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him. (from The Sacred Journey)
Every day is nothing but a collection of moments.
Do you know how many minutes are in each day? I believe it’s 1,440 minutes in a day. Now the question for me is “How many of those minutes can I live with God? How many of those minutes can I live in the awareness of His presence?
Psalm 16:8 says,
I have set the Lord always before me.
I take this verse to mean that I see all of life through the filter of God.
See what happens when I don’t have God before me… sin and temptation start to look really attractive. When I’m not living with God it’s very easy to start to think if I gave into that temptation or lived out that fantasy or had “this” maybe I would be satisfied.
But what I really want is never that thing-that woman-that man-that drug-that money-that control.
One of the biggest problems with sin is that it promises us life, but it never, never, never delivers on that promise. Those are empty promises.
What you want, what you long for, is a life that only comes by “setting the Lord before me.” It’s a life where you’re seeking to keep your mind and your heart constantly aware of God’s presence and His promises.
I would love to hear any ideas/practices/disciplines you’ve established in your life to help yourself “set the Lord before” and live in the conscious awareness of God’s presence.
Ideas?
