Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a very famous poet, once wrote,
“Earth's crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God:But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
Spiritual discipline requires one to be able to turn aside at any moment and focus your attention on God. Every moment of your life is an opprotunity to draw closer to God. Spiritual disipline in some ways is like viewing the world through the eyes of Jesus. It requires us to lay down our complaints and small mindedness. It requires us to turn aside from our daily preoccupations. Browing was saying in her poem that the world is full of good things. It is us that fail to see all the good things. We are too busy complaining about our circumstnces to turn aside. Our eyes are blinded and we refuse to take off the blinders because we are more comfortable with complaining, which seems wacko to me because complaining just gets on every one elses nerves and makes the person complaining moody and iritable. Why do we complain anyway? Let us endevor to see the extraordinary in the ordinary things. Let us see circumstances through Heavens eyes. Let us find time to turn aside.
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3 comments:
i totally agree! why should we whine when we have so much to be thankful for?
thanks alisa...thats amazing
I, too, agree. We complain about everything rather than looking for the good or for what God is doing. I think being thankful really is something we must be disciplined to do. Consciously. We need to teach ourselves to be thankful until it becomes a natural, unconscious act.
Pam S.
istanbulbluecoyote.blogspot.com
Hi there. I don't know if I know any of you guys but I lived with Erik and worked at your school acouple of years back. I fully agree with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and your teacher Pam, its a concious effort to see what God is doing. Thought I might quickly share with you a Buechner quote which is for me a bit of a life motto in a way (and since you've already written about him, all the better). Its from his book "Now and Then"
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness, touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it. Because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace."
I could explain what I think of it a bit more but I'll leave you guys to muse over it if you so wish.
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