God meets us in the imperfect

“The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”
― Peter Rollins

Can God be known?...like actually known and understood?

Is God just a construction of our minds? Are we forever limited to worship gods of our own construction because our finite minds cannot comprehend something so transcendent, something so beyond us?

Is agnosticism the only intellectually honest position on matters of the Divine?

I'm haunted by questions like these. I have been most of my adult life.

In the tension between faith and doubt, I've come to realize that I can't fully say "I know" much about answers to these questions.

I've learned that asking questions, rather than having answers, is where true faith is born. My faith is deeper and richer and stronger because I also doubt.

The nagging notion that God is a conceptual idol has been particularly formative in my spiritual journey. Please understand, that I'm not suggesting God is only something we make up. Freud's idea that God is merely wish fulfillment is a false dichotomy. Institutional religion's claim to have a flawless and accurate depiction of God is I believe, equally flawed. God is a form of wish fulfillment for all of us in some respects. But God is real beyond our constructions. He or She or It is more than just a product of human psyches attempting to cope with a difficult universe.

I took my kids to a local Jazz festival not long ago, and their anticipation was quite high in spite of my attempts to describe it ahead of time.  Upon arrival, they discovered that it wasn't the kind of festival they'd envisioned - kids activities, rides, junk food - but rather a sparse gathering of adults listening to music of a genre my kids are mostly unfamiliar with. Certainly the event was not how they had construed it to be in their minds. I had warned them of this ahead of time, but the word festival, and their own wishes for how it would be misled them. That doesn't mean the festival didn't exist. Just because it was different than their minds had created, doesn't change that it was an event they could access. And, they even found some aspects of it a source of joy, but in ways they had not anticipated.

In the opening quote of this piece, Pete Rollins reminds us of the problems with naming (which is an attempt to describe) and even trying to comprehend God. Our humanity inevitably leads us to create false conceptions. And when life turns out differently than we expect, or when God turns out differently than we expect, it's easy for us to despair.

Many of you on similar journeys to my own have shifted away from trying to box God into propositional truth, and opted for a richer experience of the divine. This is a good path. For too long in the Protestant tradition God has been an intellectual exercise, almost a theological hobby. And experience might allow us to encounter God as God is, rather than in tidy conceptualizations that inevitably mislead us.

But experience is imperfect too.

Experience occurs through a set of lenses that also warp and skew our experience of the Divine. For thousand of years philosophers have stated what contemporary neuroscience confirms. There is no pure perception, conceptualization, or experience of anything, let alone the Divine. We are limited in this respect by our human brains.

On a public transit ride home from school years ago I had a eureka moment (out loud) where it became clear to me that one of God's answers to this problem is Jesus. That in the mystery of the incarnation, we are given the opportunity to encounter God in a way that helps transcend our limitations: He becomes one of us. Truth is no longer limited to ideas, truth becomes a person we can encounter.

In years passing, I've become more convinced of this truth, but also aware that even our experience of Jesus is imperfect. Even if the red-letter words of scripture are His exact dictation, we still encounter his words through our filters: our experience, our biases, our expectations, our wishes, our traditions, and even our church's dogma. And it doesn't take very much time hanging out with people who claim Jesus as their own, to discover that even our experiences of Him are shaped by a whole host of factors.

So what occurs to me now is this:

God meets us in the imperfect.

God shows up in the midst of our idolatrous versions of Him/Her/It, and allows us encounter with the Divine.  We can spend our lives worrying about pure theology or seeking pure experiences, but God doesn't need that, because God shows up anyway. In those places of brokenness and distortion, of misnamed deities and culturally defined worship practices, God shows up.

In your messy circus of a congregation, with so many barriers to authentic encounter, God embraces imperfection and meets you there anyway.

In your solitude - away from the obnoxious imperfections of institutional religion - but equally steeped in the distortions and imperfections of your own mind  - God finds you and is present nonetheless.

We may be limited by human brains, but God is not. We may be limited by constructed ideas and experiences of God, but God is not. The transcendent transcends our imperfection. It breaks through to hearts and minds and stirs them. It gives them glimpses of a Divinity that it cannot fully grasp and leaves them changed, but still imperfect.

Today, may you be honest about the distortedness and imperfection of who you think God is, and how you experience God.

But may you also stop looking for the perfect place to find God, and recognize God meeting you in the midst of imperfection.

Waking up to bittersweet

I have a problem. I have too many pictures. I do love digital photography, but with the size of the files, and no longer paying for film...it's getting a little out of hand.

But's it's not just the ease of taking pictures that's led me to hard drives full of pictures.

I think some of it is an attempt to preserve what we know is passing quickly. I'm very attuned to how fleeting and precious these particular days of life with my family are. Summer makes it worse. I'm even more aware, even hyper-focused on the passage of time.

As I was I taking yet another picture of my kids on the beach at sunset, I wondered to myself:

"Is a photograph an attempt to deny the passage of time?"

Do we try to fool ourselves into believing that we actually can stop a precious moment and capture it? Sunset photos tend to disappoint me - you just can't capture the majesty of that light and those colors. Even really good photographs of other life events, never fully capture the experience of being there. The pictures are a nice reminder, but no matter how hard we try, we can't re-live those beautiful moments of our lives in the way we would like. Writing this on September's eve, I'm aware of how futile it is to cling to precious time.

And as I've started to live more of my life in the present moment, I've become aware of how bittersweet human existence is.

Even those moments of great joy and happiness that we experience are tinged by a sadness, because we know they are fleeting. Try as we might, we cannot cling to our happiness anymore than we can stop a handful of sand from slipping through our fingers. And the more we awaken to life as it is, we are aware of this tragedy - that life's beauty is momentary and passing. That when we find ourselves in a state of bliss, we are soon brought into grieving for its loss, knowing that we can't actually preserve those precious moments.

I think it might be that all of life is to some degree bittersweet by nature - if we are fully awake - fully aware of the passage of time and this endless cycle of joy and loss.

Is this why so many of us have these compulsive behaviours - pursuing relentlessly pleasure and happiness, always trying to capture or recreate the past joys, avoiding the grief and acknowledgment that those moments are gone? Avoiding the reality that happiness cannot be maintained by denial or creating a false sense of our ability to preserve it? Avoiding acknowledging that sorrow and suffering will always return? Refusing to accept that the essence of all human happiness is a bittersweetness because joy is so precious and evasive?

How much of our lives are constructed around trying to create and re-create happiness, fooling our selves that we can even pursue it, let alone capture it or preserve it?

Like so much else that is broken in our culture, we have created expectations for people of their own happiness. Expectations that are unrealistic and unsatisfiable - two ideal conditions for motivating people to produce and consume. But these false expectations of happiness seem to keep us only busily trapped in our own pursuit, hardly able to recognize or enjoy those things that might bring joy around us.

It is painful to acknowledge the bittersweet quality of life. I think it is worse to remain caught in relentless pursuit of things that can't be preserved.

Maybe it's not about too many or too few pictures. Maybe it's about what I'm trying to accomplish with my shutter fetish. As I wake up to the bittersweet quality of life, I realize that pictures in themselves are a joy, but like most technology, it mustn't be allowed to fool me into thinking I am anything but fully human, and fully trapped in the passage of a universe in constant flux.

I'm wondering if happiness is more about what we find in the present moment around us, rather than what we create. If I tell myself that I will be happier when I'm on a beach with people I love, listening to music and the surf, the temptation to cling to that moment when it arrives will be so strong, but also increase the sadness of its passage. If I tell myself I can only be happy in that situation, I think I will find myself more desperately trying to create the "right" conditions, and unhappy all the other times that I am not there. If on the other hand I merely open myself to what joys might be around me and take pleasure in that, there is so much less to be clung to or feared for its loss. I'm not trying to suggest we can escape the bittersweet of life, but it seems that the great wisdom traditions of our world suggest we will suffer less if cling less. That happiness will evade us if we make it our goal, and find us if we care more for others.

So I don't know if I'll take fewer pictures. But I'm definitely more aware of my relationship to pictures and what significance they might have to me. They cannot preserve the un-preservable. Instead, I'm here now. Writing this blog on my front porch on a warm August evening while my children sleep peacefully. I'm enjoying the creative process as something inside of me, perhaps even deep longings, find their way into words. And perhaps these words will open some new small part of the world for you as you read it.

The thought of that brings me a passing happiness.

Watering Weeds

I rather like dandelions. I enjoy the fields of yellow flowers in springtime.

Others in my life have a different view of them. Some others in my life have even been known to hate them so much they will poison the ground with dangerous chemicals in order to get rid of them. I understand that some kinds of impatiens are considered a weed in certain parts of the world, while we spend big money to transplant them into our gardens here.

What seems a weed to some, seems rather inoffensive, even desireable to another. But the best argument I've heard about distinguishing between a weed or not, is whether a plant is invasive. That is, does it take over and choke out other, more beneficial or desirable plants?

Personally I think grass is highly overrated - but the argument that dandelions are bad because they choke out and replace grass makes some sense to me.  

As I was watering some vegetables in my garden the other day, it occurred to me that I don’t always recognize which plants are weeds. They all got watered nonetheless.

And then I had this thought: 

"Be careful what you water in the garden that is your life."

You can cultivate all sorts of things - but just because they're green, or even have flowers, doesn't mean that they are completely good.

I realize that little habits in my life might come to resemble watering weeds.

In some ways I'm fortunate that my weeds are not the big vices like gambling or drugs or porn. Eventually most everyone knows those are weeds and comes to recognize how easily they take over, though they can be ever so difficult to uproot.

While I've been spared the destructiveness of the more obvious vices, there are those kinder, gentler weeds, less thorny ones, that aren't even always clearly weeds, that exist in my life and easily get watered. Sometimes it's because I really don't recognize them as weeds. Sometimes it's because I'm too tired or distracted to discriminate. 

For me, one of those weeds might best be called "living in the future". I'm prone to spending rather a large amount of time thinking about the future, and part of it has paid off handsomely for me. I'm usually a few steps ahead of things in life, anticipating and managing problems before they arise, planning well, and making decisions that account for a range of possible outcomes. I research. I take pride in being prepared, and a little secret pride in being more prepared than the next guy.

But like most innocuous weeds, what seems like a pleasant bit of greenery can become so much more. And "living in the future" can easily start to take over more and more of your conscious moments, taking you from the present, into the "what ifs?" of tomorrow.

Sometimes those "what ifs" are anxious. I know a lot of people for whom this is the case. Lots of days my future orientation is not anxious, but rather creative and imaginary. Which can make it even harder to recognize as a weed. I'm prone to spend a lot of time thinking about "the next thing". The next house, the next job, the next project, the next vacation, the next idea, the next big change...

This "next thing" kind of plant can live quite nicely in amongst the rest of the garden of my mind. But I've also noticed it has a tendency to behave like a weed as it starts to take over and dominate my thinking. Rather than enjoy and be present with what's happening now, my mind is always inclined to move on and push towards "progress". The joys of the present so easily get choked out by things that could or might happen someday.

How much beauty, how much goodness, how much of the presence of the Divine do we miss because our preoccupation with the future has taken over?

I think one of the ways we water these weedy thought habits is by spending time with them.

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that a rough correlation exists between how much time and practice you put into thinking something, and a corresponding physical change in neural networks. We strengthen the thought patterns that we practice. We are literally formed by the thought habits we have. The more time you spend thinking about the future, the more readily available those thoughts become, and more likely they are to be accessed. 

But beyond simple repetition, I think we water our weedy thought habits when we experience them as successful. Success reinforces us both in achieving a positive outcome, and avoiding a negative one. When we plan ahead, such as thinking through every detail of an upcoming event and it goes well, we feel our efforts were justified, effective, and maybe even responsible for creating the happiness we experienced. Worrying often has the same tendency to create an illusion of it’s own usefulness in avoiding a negative outcome. We often assume that by anticipating a something bad happening, if it fails to occur, that our worrying was warranted and useful. And while both of these may have an element of truth, the down side of it is that we are reinforced in our habit of being future focused, and without realizing it, it can start to become a lifestyle of the mind. Success makes us tempted to water the weeds without realizing exactly what it is that we are cultivating. 

Beautiful but invasive things can take over. And it’s not that there’s necessarily anything so wrong with dandelions. But it seems that humans flourishing requires a certain amount of diversity. Weeds, by their invasive nature, choke out diversity and one species takes over and dominates. Just as a good garden requires a diverse range of plant species, our mental and emotional health seems to require a certain diversity of thought life. We must be careful not to let thoughts about the future or the past take over and choke out our ability to be in the present moment. 

I can live with a few dandelions. Thinking ahead is fine and good. But I have to watch what I'm watering. I have to be aware of how easily a pretty yellow flower can take over. 

Funerals for the living

Have you ever been stuck listening to a conversation that you just didn't want to hear? 

I was on a plane seated beside a young couple who were on their way home from their own spur of the moment wedding in Las Vegas. They spent the first hour picking apart the flaws in each other's families in an incredibly mean spirited and vulgar fashion, and at volume that made it all but impossible not to hear.  At some point they seemed to realize that I was sitting beside them and they interrupted me to ask what I was reading. I told them it was a biography of Steve Jobs (which drew puzzled looks on their faces). I explained that he was the founder of Apple, and likely was responsible for Mac's and iPods and changed the music industry....but was now dead. Their response was one of horror. Apparently my saying the word "dead" was completely disgusting to them. Recalling the taboo around the word "dead" in some cultures, I quickly recanted and told them he had "passed". Upon which, they were visibly relieved and returned to their gruesome dissection of the personal traits of each other's friends. (Who knew that elbows were even part of the way people evaluate others' worth as human beings?...but to some people they are crucial. ) 

It reminded me of how quickly death and dying can elicit responses of disgust and horror. 

Our phobia of death and mortality is so pervasive that defences like denial have become entrenched and habitual, to the point that we fail to give recognition to what has passed, what is lost, and how we suffer because of it.

I think most people in our culture struggle to grieve well. By which I mean, we generally struggle to effectively confront loss.

I'm on board with the idea that funeral's should be a celebration of a person's life, but not at the expense of also engaging the true reality of loss and all the sadness that entails. One of my few painful memories from childhood was being told by a relative that I shouldn't be sad when someone dear to me had died. Even as a six-year old I knew that I needed to feel the pain of losing someone important. The possibility of afterlife changes the meaning of loss, but it doesn't eliminate the sorrow of it entirely, and to pretend otherwise is a fool's errand. Many of us skirt the feelings of loss these days when someone dies by either avoiding the unpleasant rituals of death altogether, or trying to divert our attention by focusing only on the positive (hence my hesitation about being celebratory without acknowledging sorrow).

But this difficulty with grief doesn't just apply to actual death. It's a problem with loss in general.

We often fail to acknowledge the passing - the loss of things in our lives - especially when there's no body to bury.

Theologians like Arthur McGill, and psychologists like Rollo May, have suggested that we avoid confronting loss altogether in our culture because it reminds us of death, that perceived ultimate loss that inevitably awaits us. So we pretend that people can stay young. We offer products and services that create the illusions that time isn't lost or passing. We even desperately grasp on to nostalgia and recreations of our past to shield us from the truth that everything is in a constant state of change.

There are real consequences however when we fail to acknowledge loss. Perhaps most important of those consequences is the difficulty it creates in allowing us to live the life we have in the present. 

So I've taken to giving some advice to people that seems a little peculiar at first glance: have funerals for things and people that are gone, even if they're still technically alive.

Sometimes people have changed so much they have become a totally different person than you used to know, and show no signs of going back. And this hurts. It hurts that they will never again play that role in your life, that they will never be the same person to you that they were. And like all loss, the more loving and important they were to you in the past, the deeper the hurt when they've become this new person who doesn't even resemble the one you knew. 

It's a loss and it needs to be grieved. You don't get to go to the funeral home and look at a made up body in a casket.  But you can bring in some elements of ritual that help you say goodbye and move through the grieving process. 

Write a eulogy. Identify all the dearest memories, all the funny stories, all the things that person meant to you. Read it out loud to friends at a pub, or write it on index cards with crayon while sitting in your bathtub and listening to music they loved. It doesn't really matter the format as long as you're clearly seeing and naming what was, and acknowledging that it has passed. 

Some of us need to have funerals for ourselves.

In a life permanently altered by an accident or medical condition, or even just the slow process of deterioration that comes with aging, we are changed so significantly that a part of us is gone. Very often our identities are tied up in what we "do" in our physical capabilities and activities. Is it any wonder then that an illness or disabling condition can feel remarkably like a part of our selves has died? This too is a loss we must grieve. The loss of self, even while we are alive is painful and disorienting. And if you need to have a funeral, go ahead. Wear black, bury something, make a poster-board of memories of what has passed. Honour your loss. Don't try to make it a good thing too quickly. Many of us have been lead to under appreciate the value and importance of negative emotions, thinking that we should quickly find a happier note to sing lest we fall into wallowing. A funeral can be a good place to find permission to be sad and cry. 

At the heart of all grief is the uniquely human emotion of bittersweet. We who are made in the image of the Divine have this capacity to feel both sorrow and joy at the same time. Joy for what was, and for what the person or thing meant to us. But also sorrow. Sorrow for the fact that it is now gone and can never be exactly replaced. Remember, that its irreplaceable quality is precisely what made it so precious and special while it was present. 

Loss is an ongoing part of our lives as they were in the past. Ignoring loss steals the present from us as well. 

On one hand I'm tempted to be critical of the couple that sat next to me on the plane for covering up the reality of death with a more sanitized word like "passed" to avoid facing the fear and pain associated with loss.

On the other hand, I think the word "passed" has it's own value for marking the constant flow of loss that happens in all of our lives. There will never be a day exactly like today. Friends I love are getting older and closer to illness. My kids are growing up. Opportunities to show love are vanishing as quickly as they appear. 

Today is passing. 

All of life around us is passing as we journey forward. It makes every moment precious. It means constant losses. 

I'm not writing this piece with any one person in mind. All of you who read this blog are on journey's of loss because you are human.

So may you discover the quintessentially bittersweet quality of human life in all of its fullness by acknowledging and honouring your losses. Even if it means having a small funeral for something that's alive but changed... and eating some triangle sandwiches in a church basement afterward. 

Jesus ain't your therapist...or is He?

I realized a couple mornings ago after talking to my spiritual director, that lots of times we treat Jesus like a therapist - someone we turn to, to help make us well.

Part of my frustration with Christianity has been it's failure to produce the kinds of changes in myself and others that I think it should be able to produce. And Jesus, just doesn't seem to be a good therapist after all - because I've been meeting with him for a bunch of years, but still find myself messier than I'd like to be.

I have a longing for deep transformation. But sometimes church makes me feel like I'm at an Amway convention where the hype seems bigger than the real thing most people are experiencing.

But in my helpful conversation a few mornings ago I came to realize that being changed by God isn't the primary reason I'm invited into relationship with God. The real purpose of following, is to be with Jesus. It's relationship, just for the sake of relationship. Or intimacy for the purpose of intimacy. God wants to restore the relationship broken between God and creation. It's reconciliation first, and then change as the by-product of being restored in the relationship. Like most people in my culture, I often just want God to be useful to me, without the entanglements of a real friendship.

Skye Jethani, in his brilliant book, "With: Re-imagining the Way You Relate To God", describes how frequently we take one of four postures towards God: Life Under God, Life Over God, Life From God, or Life For God. In Skye's perspective, all of these represent a half-truth, a distortion, a way of relating to God that ultimately ends up trying to control the world by placing God in a certain position, but neglecting to actually be present and intimate.

I think I could add one to Skye's list. It's a posture of "Life Consuming God", where we turn God into some kind of commodity to be used for our own purposes. There are plenty ways this plays out, but I'm particularly aware of how we use God or Jesus as a kind of therapeutic tool - to satisfy our fears and unhappiness with life.  Whether it's the big troubling questions of existence, or more like using God as our own personal life coach to help us make little improvements here and there, we follow a dominant pattern in our culture that encourages us to think about everything in terms of what it can be used for. 

But it we pursue God for our own ends, even if they are noble goals like wanting deep transformation, we taint the relationship by bringing our agenda to it, rather than wanting it for it's own sake. If I try to forge a friendship with a lawyer because I'm hoping for free legal advice, the relationship is never really about them as a person, it becomes based on what they in their role can provide for me. If I come to God primarily looking for some kind of method of personal change or growth, it places a block in the relationship. And in the case of God, trying to use God for our purposes is a gross distortion of the created order - it turns God into an idol rather than fully acknowledging that we God's creation and subject to God, rather than the other way around.

So Jesus isn't your therapist?

Well, yes and no.

Yes, a relationship with God is transformative, but there are problems if it's they primary reason or focus of pursuing closeness. It really needs to be a by-product of the relationship instead. Life with God is therapeutic. But it's important not to seek out God as our therapist, but instead seek God just because He/She is God.


Relationship purely for the sake of relationship. No agenda, no aims, no using the other person for something...and...with the God of the universe.

Mind-boggling isn't it?

The Perils of Success

It seems self-evident that success is a good thing.

Not many people would advise you to careful about success, or tell you that it can be...dangerous.

Psychologists often talk to people about not taking their failures to heart too much. That is, we help people step out of their perceived failures and understand that the assumptions of personal responsibility that most of us make when it comes to failure, are often incorrect, or at least distorted.

You are not a failure, even if you have failed many times. Or, as a wise person once said, "failure is an event, not a person". What we seem to know about failure is that in many situations our minds are inherently biased to attribute far too much of the failure to our own personal inadequacies, and spend far too little energy appreciating the complex reasons that a person may have failed. (there are for sure exceptions to this, but it doesn't diminish my argument to ignore them for the time being)

Even our definitions of "failure" and "success" are prone to change depending on perspective and time. If you're anything like me, you might look back at your life and see things that seemed like great failures at the time, but now see them as crucial changing points and opportunities that led to all sorts of good things in your life. The same can be true with successes. What seemed like a great accomplishment years ago, may have become significantly less important over the passing years, or even may no longer seem like a success as what you deem important in life also changes. A mentor of mine once advised me that there's no such thing as "winning" and argument with your spouse...that success in being "right" also comes with a cost to the relationship.


More commonly though, success carries with it a particular danger and it has something to do with the reasons we tell ourselves for why we were successful.

In failure or success, what we attribute as the cause of the outcome is absolutely critical. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our failures, we often overlook a host of factors that were beyond our control and end up believing things about ourselves that are untrue. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our successes, we make the same mistake.

Either side of the coin, we feed our false self more incorrect information about who we really are. We begin to take responsibility for things that aren't really our responsibility. While it may be obvious how problematic that is with failure, we're not usually aware of how it works with success.

Success often creates the illusion that we are more than we really are. That we are more in control, more able to influence outcomes, more clever, more skilled, more knowing than we really could ever be. Success creates the expectation that if we are able to have things go our way one time, that we should be able to create the same outcome again in the future.

The trouble is, success, when we attribute it to ourselves, can so easily narrow our understanding of situations that we neglect to notice all the other things that went right, but that were not under our control.

And if we make success a habit, that false self we all have begins to be shaped and molded into a belief that we are the makers of our own destiny. That we are in are charge of our corner of the universe. That we make things happen.

Success breeds the myth of the self-made man/woman.  All of the other people and factors, all of the gifts and sacrifices made by others that contribute to, or even make our success possible are ignored as we begin to believe ourselves to be the authors of our own life stories.

Is it any wonder then, that all of us must learn through suffering? Not just any suffering, but the kind of suffering that mortally wounds our false selves and exposes us to the true vulnerability of being a human in this universe. If we see the impact success has on our egos, it becomes obvious that we can only really learn through failures that destroy the illusions of our past successes and force us to see how we are but one small factor in an enormously complex world.

Suddenly the Sermon on the Mount makes a new kind of sense to me. It is all of us who have been crushed to the point where we recognize our true poverty as humans that are truly "blessed". Suffering brings us the gift of becoming "spiritual zeros", who begin to really find God, and not just some God-type religious product that we were actually using to build our own empires. Maybe Jesus doesn't say "blessed are the successful" because He knows how dangerous success can be. He knows that success will build us a false self that becomes an idol: one that takes the place of God and becomes the source of our worship. But those who have failured, the ones who see their true place in the universe, neither locating themselves as the full source of success or failure, they're the people who see God because they are not putting themselves in His place.

Be wary of success my friends. Remind me of my own words in the future if more success comes my way.

Inattentiveness

I realized something the other day.

My dog doesn't realize that I pick up his poop.

He is always looking somewhere else as I do it. He knows there are bags. He knows there is a pause after he does his business in which he is supposed to stay put. But I really don't think he knows that I pick it up. I also believe this because he is so choosy about the spot he goes...you'd think after 13 years, if he really knew that it was going to get picked up anyway, that he wouldn't care about the laser precision with which he must choose his spot. (Regardless by the way of whether it is 40 degrees below zero, or a tsunami is immanent)

So I was having difficulty sleeping a few nights ago and thinking about this - what seems like a trivial issue - and decided to do the math in my head....I've been walking this dog for 10, almost 11 years and if my calculations are correct, I've picked up in ballpark of 7000 dog turds.  Some people count sheep when they can't sleep, I count....

Well after I finished counting, and still couldn't sleep, I got to thinking this:

"In my own life, what kind of things have happened around me 7000 times that I don't ever pay attention to, or even know is going on?"

In some ways the question is impossible to answer: if I haven't paid attention to it, how could know whether I've missed it or not.

But the possibility that there are things constantly going on around me that I'm inattentive to, is perhaps more crucial than the things themselves.

And as I still couldn't sleep that night, I reflected upon all the thousands of nights when sleep has come easily to me. So easily, that I didn't have to pay attention to it at all.

It's so often the case that we don't really pay attention to things until there's a problem, or the things we're used to having run smoothly suddenly don't.

What do we miss by not paying attention to the commonplace things of life? With all the distractions in our lives is there a hidden cost to being so incredibly absent from our experiences? I realized recently that when I'm teaching mindfulness, this is one of the mental postures I'm inviting people to engage. That there is tremendous value to tuning in to the commonplace and ordinary things of our lives. That our default setting as humans is to only pay attention when things go "wrong" and neglect what's happening in those big spaces that make up the rest of our lives. We become that manager or spouse, or coach, or parent that everybody loathes; the one that only says something when there's a problem, and never acknowledges the beauty and goodness in the in-between.

Life is a gift. Everything in our lives are also gifts. If our attentiveness is limited to problem-solving, to novelty, to the unexpected, we miss out on most of the amazing gifts that exist in the mundane, run-of-mill, feeding and cleaning up after kids parts of our existence.

I know I'm not even remotely saying something new here. Others have articulated it more beautifully than I have. But perhaps today we can stop and notice. We can remind each other that there are things like picking up dog poop going on all around us. While my dog may not grasp the significance of the act even if he were to notice it, there is goodness and beauty in the act of removing his fecal matter from my neighbor's lawn. There is a demonstration of care - for the dog, for the neighborhood, and for my wife who can stay inside on bitterly cold days while I walk the faithful hound. Care is a gift. The capacity to care, and the opportunities to care for, are also gifts.

And while my dog may not have noticed the act of my poop removal, until now, I hadn't really paid much attention either....at least not to the significance of this ordinary act, repeated 7000 times, but that points to the caring and gifting in daily life.

Even insomnia, for one night, is a gift if it brings my consciousness to how God shows up in what seems to be insignificant and meaningless places, if only we can notice, and pay attention.

But paying attention I'm learning, takes much deliberate practice. It is not something we change through a moment of insight, but through a life in which we choose disciplines and rituals that slow us down and orient us towards contemplation and reflection, towards a practice of attentiveness that runs counter to our human brain's proclivity for crisis management.

So today I might encourage you to pay attention. But more so I encourage you in the journey of practicing attentiveness, of finding practices and rituals that regularly bring you back to attention to all that is going on around you. And in the midst of it, whether it be dog poop or insomnia or any of the 7000 normal things in your life, may you see and enjoy God's gifts and care.