Pause and Pay Attention - Part One

“Pause and Pay Attention - Part One”

Recently, I observed a construction site adjacent as I was leaving a meeting.  I noticed a worker using machinery to pack down the dirt on a plot of land.  He rolled over and over the same space innumerable times.  I thought to myself, “How boring!  What an incredible waste of time and fuel!”  As I thought further, I realized my dismissive attitude robs me of an important spiritual and practical lesson.  It occurs to me firm, level ground is necessary to a building’s foundation which in turn is essential to strength and durability.  I now grasp the importance of that worker’s monotonous task to a person’s internal and spiritual life.  If I persist in my flippant thinking, I miss wonderful and mysterious invitations of God’s grace.  That experience teaches me to pause and pay attention for daily summons into God’s presence.  The willingness to stop, listen, and observe graces us with many solutions embedded within daily routines.

How do we become more attentive to constant invitations of grace?  If we practice being alert, we find spiritual lessons in everything.  Training our eyes, ears and minds to focus upon mundane activities and ask the five “Ws” and “H” (who, what, when, where, why and how) is the essence of pausing and paying attention.  In mundane tasks such as mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, vacuuming the carpeting, changing the oil, and eating meals, God graciously offers answers to longstanding perplexing questions.  Ironically, pain and personal problems create venues for spiritual lessons.  One author posits, “Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress.”  Stop and pay attention to purposes buried beneath the surface.  Actually, every problem becomes a possibility for personal progress and spiritual development.

A healing narrative in Matthew 17:14-23 illustrates immeasurable benefits to paying attention and learning about God’s healing power.  As the scene opens, a rather distraught father whose son had lingered in affliction of epilepsy and seizures for many years approaches the disciples for his son’s healing.  The father assumes the disciples who travel with Jesus and intimately relate to Him are able to emulate His healing power.  Interestingly, the father’s assumption challenges contemporary disciples.  Do people come to us for living water because they know we are Christians?  Do family members, friends, and colleagues come to us for inner healing and wholeness because of our Christian witness?  Nonetheless, this desperate father seeks the disciples’ help and they are unable to heal his son.  After three years of private tutorials with the Lord Jesus Christ, certainly the disciples should have been able to heal the boy.  Yet, they take time to pause, listen and learn from their failure as they ask the Lord to explain their inability to heal the suffering boy.

We can relate to the disciples’ predicament. We face daily challenges without resources to rectify them.  Adversities baffle us.  The depth and length of our obstacles paralyze us.  We settle for life’s merry-go-round of life; we do the same thing in the same way at the same time.  Life loses its zeal and luster.  As a consequence, we miss God’s gracious invitations that He cloaks in daily monotony.

In the heart of this passage, verses seventeen to twenty-one, the disciples straightforwardly ask the Lord about their dilemma.  “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”  The Lord tells them, “Because you have so little faith.”  In other words, you could not drive out the demon and heal the boy because you fail to appreciate opportunities God puts within obstacles.  You do not have a mustard seed’s worth of faith!