Stop, look, and listen

I could sense the hint of danger in her voice--the warning. So I paid attention to Mrs. Hamilton explaining to my fifth-grade class how to avoid getting run over. “When you cross the street,” my teacher told us, “don’t just step out, but stop. Look. Listen.” Only then, walk.

When I cross a downtown street, I have hardly to think twice now. I do instinctively what I had to do by practiced effort back then. But I still have to work on the soundness of that pattern in other ways now. I need what I heard from Mrs. Hamilton in a larger sense.

I approach the bustle and tasks too often caught up, distracted, driven. I bear down and speed up, to use the phrase of executive coach Scott Eblin, when I should slow down and look around more, look inside more.

It’s hard to stop, sometimes. We don’t just get active, we get agitated. We get stirred up when we should just be still. And there’s always something needing getting done. Always.

I see another picture in Jesus’s life. In the Gospels he was careful some days to stop activity and movement. But it was more than stopping; he paused to pray. He let God recalibrate his view. He listened to the loving words that form his conversation with his divine Father.

One evening “The whole city was gathered around the door” of the place he was staying, Mark tells us. There’s so much need driving the townspeople that the crowd come to see him is spilling out into the street. There’s lots to do, wherever Jesus turns around, wherever he looks. I’m sure it was pretty noisy in that front yard. His is a ministry pressed in by a world of hurt and need and brokenness.

But then this: “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Even Jesus made sure he got away from the press of motion and commotion. He knows he is throwing himself against a cosmic drama and waging a spiritual battle.

Jesus seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of power to help and heal because he not only looked around. He also looked upward for help. He guarded communion with his Father.

As Mark says, he heads out to a deserted place. Remote, as in a place to get away. One translation says lonely place.

Why would I think I need spiritual help any less?

When I began pastoral ministry, I was as pastor the sole paid staff of Germantown Brick Church of the Brethren in Rocky Mount, Virginia, an almost-rural congregation in the southwest of the state. I was just 23, but church members welcomed me warmly. In their kindness they overlooked my youth.

And I threw myself into the work, preaching, visiting in homes and hospitals, burying the dead, marrying the young. But I went at it so intensely that I wouldn’t take a day off. I just worked and worked.

Until, that is, Jill, mother of our first newborn, insisted I take a day off every week. As tired as I was getting, I didn’t take much convincing.

But it was more than that that I needed. More than just a more sustainable rhythm. I needed a shift in how I viewed my world and my work.

I was mistaken in thinking that what happened in ministry or service all depended on me.

I prayed some mornings, tried to have time to read the Bible and spiritual writers and tend to my own soul, but I was in danger of joining the ranks of ministers who, as one spiritual life writer put it, have all kinds of plans and projects and appointments, but who have lost their soul somewhere in the midst of their activities.

I needed to realize it takes God’s resources to do God’s work.

Then Jill and I took on an even more challenging assignment, planting a church in the suburbs of Houston. It was hard work. Discouraging at times.

And it was there, finally, that I realized how much I could not get by just on my own imagined self-importance and ingenuity and energy.

And I really turned to a spiritual life writer for the first time that I had heard about and almost ignored: Henri Nouwen. And Nouwen was talking about this very passage in Mark, this very scene where Jesus goes away to a deserted place to pray. Nouwen wrote, “In the center of breathless activities, we hear a restful breathing. Surrounded by hours of moving we find a moment of quiet stillness.”

The more, Nouwen continued, “The more I read this nearly silent sentence locked in between the loud words of action, the more I have the sense that the secret of Jesus’ ministry is hidden in that lonely place where he went to pray, early in the morning, long before dawn.”

When we want to make a difference in the world about us, we not only look around at the opportunity and demand, we look up for the spiritual support. Do we think we can do God’s immense work with our puny abilities? It’s hard to stop, sometimes, teeth-grindingly so.

But what I’m suggesting can also be simple: Looking out the window can be a spiritual practice.

Looking up at the uplifted branches of trees (weighed with an almost glowing ice coating, I see, in this moment out my window). A glimpse can for just a moment remind us of bigger truths, wider reasons to trust.

Looking at someone we love or admire for more than a glance will reconnect us. Listening, truly listening, to a spiritual encouragement from a friend or a Psalm can give us a whole new perspective. The world is noisy, Eugene Peterson once said. The Internet even more clangorous some days.

So, I tell myself: Don’t just pay attention to the loudest voices. Be still. Take time to look. I try to remember that there’s lots to listen for.

Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash