It’s the Simple Things

The best things in life are often the smallest.

The first time you exercise after a bout of sickness. A good home-cooked meal. A bowlful of cherries. Flowers you buy just because.

And the best kind of thing – letters from people you love, especially when those people are your niece and nephews. Especially when their drawings remind you that the world is, in fact, a pretty beautiful place, and that you aren’t as far from home as you feel.

Your moment of Zen ...

All in the Waiting

I cleaned the windows in my flat today for the first time in months. I realized when I was home sick this week, sitting on my couch for the better part of every day, that they were pretty dirty.

So I got my cathartic clean on this morning -- the first day without rain in a while. And as I moved from window to window, from inside to out, in that repetitive wiping movement, I realized that those windows were a lot like my relationship with God lately -- that my view has been a bit skewed from the dirty film of my misconceptions about who he is.

It's pretty easy to bring our own ideas about God into situations. To think that God is a lot like this world we live in. Lately, I've been struggling to remember that he is good, that he has good plans for me. (I suppose that's the universal struggle, really.)

A few weeks ago, as I was sitting on a bus stuck in bad traffic that turned a 4 hour trip into a 7 hour trip, I realized that my whole life right now feels like one big waiting room. Not just waiting to get home. Waiting for my new job to start. Waiting for new friendships to deepen. Waiting for someone to share my life with. Waiting to be changed.

The 7-hour bus ride was a return trip from a week retreat with my church. It was good in many ways. I learned a lot. I also struggled a lot. But the thing I came away with was the sense that God is doing something in my life. I just can't see it yet. And my part in the changing of the scenery is to wait. To actively wait, which Henri Nouwen defined best in "A Spirituality of Waiting: Being Alert to God's Presence in Our Lives."

"The secret from waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means that you are present to the moment, fully and totally, in the conviction that something is happening where you are, and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is very present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment. You see, that's what the world 'patience' means. See, the word 'patience' means the willingness to stay where you are and live it out to the full, to taste the moment to the full in the conviction that something is hidden there that will manifest itself to you."

If I'm honest, I haven't really wanted to be present to the moment lately because the moment, well, it seems a bit overwhelming. And like a petulant child, I haven't wanted to wait.

It goes pretty much hand in hand with the fact that I haven't made a lot of room for God in my life recently. I have been too busy with work and getting things done to listen for him. I have spent time with him, sure, but in a rushed way that leaves little room for him to speak into my life. Because I have been tired. Tired of the stress at work. Tired of the waiting. Tired of myself.

My life's not going to slow down any time soon. If anything, it's about to get busier. Which is why it's all the more important to train my ear to his still, small voice -- which speaks into even the most mundane moments of my day. People all too often think that God is separate from our everyday lives. But the more I know of God, the more I see that he is in everything. That he is the undercurrent flowing through this world of ours.

I know that I will lose focus again, that I will struggle with the same old battles, just as my windows will get dirty again. But life, if anything, is a process. And for now, I'm with T.S. Eliot:

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."