Four Gs of Life Part 4

 

Yesterday, we talked about the Rabbi and Levite passing by, how they might have (we really don’t know) been glancing and glaring and gnawing on life.  Today, I want to focus on the Samaritan who gazes on the one in the ditch.  This way of being is counter cultural because it will ask us to slow down.  There is a tension between glancing and gazing and the culture encourages you to do the former not the latter.  Case in point, your social media fed with its thirty second videos and immediately another one pops up.  No time to digest or reflect or respond, keep moving.  We do this in worship, too.  Move quickly from one thing to the next with little space or silence in-between.  We live in a time when someone asks how you are doing, it is acceptable to say, “Busy”.  Wait, what?  Is the meaning of life a full calendar?  Is the meaning of life defined as being necessary and needed?  To gaze is counter cultural, because often we skim the surface on the first pass of encountering and experiencing life and rarely reflect on what we might have missed.  For example, most of us will listen to a song once, do a thumbs up or down, and move on.  But what if we need to linger and listen again to the song?  What if we need to slow down and talk to someone who made a bad first impression?  What if our operating mode was gazing?  I fully appreciate that what I am writing here will cause others to glare and gnaw at you.  I can hear the objections from my own inner critic, “This will never work, Wes, life is too crazy busy…and look at all the needs in the world ~ so many storms out there and in here to use the passage from Sunday.  Don’t just sit there, do something!”  Perhaps our frantic and frenzied pace of life isn’t saving the world the way we think.  Perhaps our glancing, glaring, gnawing ways of being are not helping to heal the world or work to repair the world alongside the One who is still creating.  Pick one meeting, appointment, time in your calendar today when you can gaze.  It doesn’t have to be hours…it can be a few minutes.  What if you continued this prayer practice throughout the month of February and into the season of Lent?  May God continue to help us see, not just with our eyes, but gaze with our hearts and souls upon each other and this world God so loves.  Amen.