Are You Listening?

Monday morning I woke up and engaged in the most holy practice I know, running (for those of you that think that is strange, you should have notice by now I am a little different).  As I was running down our block, I had my headphones in blasting some rock music to get me pumped up to run at 6am, when something caught the corner of my eye.  I quickly looked up to see three doe just walking across the street into a field near our house.  It was amazing to see, and to think I almost missed it.  I was looking down watching my feet, and almost missed this really cool start to my morning.  After that I took a moment and thought to myself, what else have I missed?  Through the rest of my run I tried hard to be aware, and noticed the frost on the trees and the brilliant colors on the few burning bushes that had not shed all their leaves yet.  I saw happy people, angry people, confused and stressed out people, and to think I was just running for about 40 minutes, and I saw all those things, that I could have missed.

Next week we will celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday made to celebrate and be thankful for all that we have in our lives.  At family gatherings and church the question will be asked what are you thankful for?  Every year I feel like I just say the same generic things, family, life, church, friends.  Yet deep down inside I believe that I should have more specific things to be grateful for in my life related to each of those.  To think that over the course of year, all I could come up with was the same generic answers, is well, disappointing.

But then I began to think, maybe there are things that I would be grateful for, if I saw them.  It is not that God is hiding them from me, but that I am instead just not seeing them.  For one family, a biopsy of 2 lumps went in to the pathologist to see how bad the cancer had spread throughout her body.  After a long wait the results came back, there was no cancer found!!  The doctor simply said, we must have misdiagnosed it originally, that’s why there was no cancer.  And that could have been it; the family could have forgotten it all as just a stressful misdiagnosis.  But they would have missed the miracle that God did before them.  They would have missed the chance to be grateful for God’s healing in her life.

But we can miss things for lots of reasons, we are too busy, we choose to ignore things, we just are not looking, or that we don’t believe there is anything to see.  But we can miss out on so much of what God is doing in us and around us.  So take some time this week to listen and watch, that way on Thanksgiving when everyone says, “What are you thankful for?”  You will have something different to share this year.