Monday, July 11

Altar

Today, as I'm sitting in the Christ in Youth offices, one thought has struck me.  Five weeks.  Five weeks left here in Joplin.  Five weeks to spend time with my event staff team and family, and five more weeks until I finally get to embrace Dustin.  Five more weeks until I go back to live at home for a few months.  Five more weeks until concrete wedding details have to start emerging.  Five more weeks until I need to find a way to make money.

The thought is a bit overwhelming.

The thing is, time goes so fast here.  When you are busy going from event to event, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, a summer flies by.  It eventually becomes just a blip on the timeline of your life; a series of fond memories that are the distant past.

I'm not ready for the next few weeks to become a checklist or a finish line.  I desperately want to see Dustin and my family, yes, but I don't want to miss what God has for me in this moment.  Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest, professor, and theologian, wrote one of my favorite books ever entitled An Altar in the World.  In this book, she describes the manner in which Biblical heroes encountered moments in which the Living God reached out to them.  Many times, they encountered the sacred in the everyday: a dream, a whisper, a bush.

The problem is the everyday is simple: we are used to it.  After we notice the gently swaying willow tree outside our window, we forget it exists.  We create routines and start to mechanically plow through our day.  I wonder how many times God is waiting in the gentle rain, only to have me brush right past?

I want to be present in the moment...I want to encounter the living and active God in the everyday and see the sacred in the mundane.  This is my prayer for the rest of the summer, and really, for this whole season of life.

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