The Bush Was Already Burning | Unforced (Week 2) | Chad Belew

hey, we are continuing our series Unforced this week. Unforced. We're talking about the

unforced rhythms of grace. And so I'm gonna dive in real quick. It's funny when I'm riding these

things, there's always something comes up that's like, oh, that'll be good for this. And last

night it came up at like 11.30. Last night we were sitting in the living, we just gotten back to the

house from actually moving Jaden, our 21 year old into his first apartment. Yeah, I know, it's

sad. I've got a, his room's gonna be my theater room now. Just kidding. I'm just kidding. We have

too many kids for that. As we were packing up Jaden's stuff and moving it out, out of his room,

the kids were moving their stuff into the room. It was like that. So, we moved out, we got home,

moved out, moved in, which he moved into like these like college apartments and we got there and

the apartment was disgusting. I was like, you didn't even clean? Like, they didn't clean this before you

got here? Just not nice. But, um, his mom's body and his mom Bethany and all the daughters went to the store and

bought all kinds of stuff. So, I'll be paying for that for a few months. Came back with these bags and

like hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. And I was like, I thought you said this was his moment to

spread his wings and fly. But yeah, we're setting it up, bring him up. I was ready to be like, good luck,

bro. But anyway, we dropped him off, got him all set up. He's good. Excited for him. He did say he's

gonna be back, which I don't know what that means. But we'll find out. We got back last night, we're

sitting, I was sitting in the living room and my body had gone up to a yard of bed and our 11

year old came downstairs. And we've schools back in the shin, right? So, we've implemented like

device time limits. So, you just can't be on your device forever. So, now that he doesn't have his

iPad all the time, he like comes down and wants to talk, which is cool. So, Jet came down and we

started talking and Jet and I fell down a rabbit hole together. It started with one, one science

question. Jet's the kind of kid who asks like the real questions. And, uh, why don't I try not to

hold back much? We're like, all right, here we go. We're gonna have this conversation. And so we

just went and we won't talk about the original stuff. It's a long story. But we got to a point

where like how animals are born, why some animals carry their babies inside and some lay eggs and

then walk away or what how all of that happens. We talked about DNA. What's actually happening

inside of a mother's body while a baby's being built. And somehow Jet and I don't know are both

super ADHD. So, you know how these conversations move maybe. We're deep in the animal kingdom at

this point, right? Um, Mottie comes down. We're watching videos on YouTube because I'm kind of

answered. I'm like, let's just watch the video. And so, we're watching videos on YouTube. We're

watching ones about Aragorn Falcon, which if you don't know this, and if you've been here a while,

you do, but that's by far my favorite animal world. Um, so watching this video on the

Peregrine Falcon and how we're learning about how engineers spent like whole careers studying this

bird and how it survives a 200 mile an hour dive. And it dives silently enough. It can

catch another bird in the air in order to feed itself. There's a picture where they actually took

this bird and there's theory that engineers actually studied the way that the bird dives

to find out how it so silently and so quickly, um, and it influenced how the, uh, B2's bomber was

created. Um, and so we're watching that. Watch this thing about slime mold and slime, it's like this

like brainless yellow goo that scientists in Japan let loose on the map of Tokyo. They like out,

they created the map Tokyo, they took oats, which apparently slime mold loves. Um, I didn't

do that, but they took oats and they put oats where like major hubs were in Tokyo and they put the

slime mold on, on this little dish and they studied how the slime mold moved. See how it would move

from major hub to major hub. And it grew itself into a near copy of the Tokyo rail system,

which is one of the most efficient rail systems in the world. And so it showed them sufficient

ways to connect from one point to another on the map. Like engineers took notes on what the goo is

doing to do this at another point. Like, look at this, it's crazy. You should look it up. It's

fascinating, but let me not wrap up too much here. It turns out like with all of this, what happened

and just so, you know, the Tokyo, the actual Tokyo network on the bottom was already done.

They had already created it, but they wanted to see if the mold would find a better way. And you

can see that they're really similar. It's saying stuff, but it turns out there's a whole discipline

for this. It's called bio mimicry. Bio mimicry is the practice of learning from and mimicking the

strategies, forms and practices, processes of nature to solve human design and engineering problems.

Look it up. You might go die, but hold that I went down. It's fascinating. They're building

buildings that can die now. You're like, what? It though that when they die, they go into like,

it creates this. It's a whole thing. Anyway, okay. Just so you guys know, I'm off my meds for a

couple of weeks. You're on, you're all noticing this, aren't you? And now, let me, let me,

11th at night, jets meds have worn off. I'm off my meds. Mottie comes downstairs.

Mottie walks downstairs and we're watching mold grow on the TV and she's like, what is happening?

Anyway, I'm not going to run you all the way down the rabbit hole that we went on,

but I do want to talk about a fascinating bio mimicry story that has probably, not probably,

it has absolutely affected literally everyone in this room. It come in 1940s from a Swiss engineer.

The Swiss engineer's name is George de Mistral. And the story goes that George was out on a walk.

He's walking in the mountains with his dog. And when he got home, the dog is covered in burrs.

The coat, he's his dog. He's like little burrs. You guys know him. We live in South Texas. If you

walk through like high grass, you come home, your socks are covered and the little stickers, the

burrs, right? So his dog's covered in burrs. He gets home, dogs covered in pants, socks, whatever.

He's got burrs everywhere. Every single person in history, if you've walked through this, you've

done this, you come home, you do the same thing. You pull the burrs off, you grumble, you complain,

you throw them away and then you move on. Well, not de Mistral. He did was he put one of those

under a microscope. He's like, what is this thing? Why is it doing this? And what he saw was there

were thousands of tiny hooks grabbing anything that had some form of a loop. And because he looked,

your kids can wear shoes that you don't have to tie. Because what came of that,

burrs and dogs hair is a thing called the crow. He looked at how the burrs hooked into a loop and

was like, oh, this like holds really strong, strong enough like the astronauts in NASA to keep things

together. Like Velcro is incredible. And it came from nature. It's a biomimicry process where he

looked at biology, looked at nature, mimicked it. The interesting thing is the burr was always

sticky. It would always grab onto something, but someone finally looked to figure out how it worked.

And here's what got me while I'm sitting here chatting with, with Jett and Mottie has now joined

the conversation. She's just eyes wide open like what is happening. Like I said, came in mid

ADHD deep into the rabbit hole of nature and babies. And the interesting thing is the burr

didn't change, right? Nature wasn't hiding anything. The answer was stuck to every dog in Europe.

Everybody that went on a walk like this, this guy did. The whole difference became

not just the annoyance, but it became this invention that one man died to pay attention

to a thing that everybody else brushed off. And honestly, like just a side note, if I'm honest,

I've learned more in a lot of years of following this kid's curiosity than he has ever learned

from my answers. That's why we watch YouTube. So here's how many good morning. What if this whole

idea is not just how inventions work, but what if this is how faith works? And I'm gonna give a

quick thing from last year, disclaimer before we go on. I gave you an assignment who did the

assignment. I'm just kidding. Don't raise your hand. That's the, well, you fail. I'm just kidding.

I gave you an assignment last week, one practice, smallest possible version of whatever practice

that was. And I'm gonna handle this the way that we're gonna handle everything throughout this

series every single week. So get used to this rhythm. I'm not really, I wasn't asking for hands.

I'm not asking for how it went. There's no report that's who, if you did your small thing,

good. Not like good job. Like just good. You did it. Something quiet got practice. And if you didn't,

then nothing happened. Like you didn't fall behind. There's no behind. There's no score board.

You didn't get moved down the scoreboard. The entire point of last week was nothing happens

even if you miss it. That's not the point of it. A practice is something you can pick back up

without penalty. There's no loophole. And so what we're talking about, we're gonna look at what

practice is and not performance and not a scoreboard. So this week, the first actual practice that

we're gonna talk about is one that is gonna underlie everything talked about during this

unforced series for the next, I think six or seven weeks. So here we go. Some of you are so

mad at me about this gorilla. There's a picture a few months ago, I showed you a video and I told

you to count the passes, the basketball passes between the people in the white shirts. And you're

watching, I don't know, I think there's people in the black, yeah, people in the black shirts

as they pass. You were supposed to count how many passes there were. In half of the room

they're directly at a person in a grille suit as they walked through the chaos and they never saw

the person because when it was over, it's like how passes were there and they're like 15 and like

awesome, you did great. Now who saw the grill? And people were like, what? And literally he just,

the gorilla actually walked, stood in the middle, beat its chest, and then walked, walked off and

half the room didn't see it, which is normal. This is a psychology test. And the reason I keep

bringing it up is we're going to talk about attention and your attention is not, it's not a window,

it's a feeling. You don't see the world, you see what you're looking for. So whatever your

attention is tuned to, that's the world that you live in. We've talked about it. If you're tuned

to threats, you live in a threatening world. If you're tuned to what's missing, you live in scarcity.

Tune to your phone, you live in your phone. You don't see the world, you see what you're looking

for. Nobody experiences everything because everybody's running a filter, which is a question that I

want to sit with this morning. The question is, what is your filter doing to God? There's a story

in Genesis that I've never actually preached in 11 years of this church, which are 10 years, almost

that I found kind of interesting that I never talked about it, but we're going to talk about it.

So Jacob, there's two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob is on the run. He's conned his brother,

he actually went in, he tricked his dad into giving him the inheritance that his brother was

supposed to get. It's pretty interesting. He put animal hair on his own because his brother's really

hairy and his dad couldn't see, and so he tricked him. He was like, "Oh, look, it's me. I'm the hairy

guy." But he conned his brother, the family has detonated, everybody's upset, and his brother Esau

has stated plans that he's going to kill him. So Jacob is fleeing. He's running across the country,

he's alone, it gets dark in the middle of nowhere. There's no tent, no camp, and he finds a rock.

He puts it under his head and uses it as a pillow.

And the detail of that is a text, and that's how you know how alone he was,

as he puts a rocker's head and he passes out. So it says this, Jacob beers Sheba and set out to

Huron. When he reached a certain place, he stopped night because the sun had set. Taking one of the

stones there, he put it under his head and he lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a

stairway resting on the earth with his top reaching to heaven and the angels of God were ascending and

descending on it. There above it stood the Lord. Notice what this dream is not. When he starts to

have at the dream, this is not a dream of heaven cracking open for special visit and something

comes down, like the staircase comes down, and then because the stairway is already resting on the earth.

The angels are already ascending, descending. All right. He comes into this thing mid-ship,

right? They're going. There's ongoing traffic between heaven and earth. And Jacob has camped

in the middle of the interchange without knowing it. He lay down. He had no idea what was going on.

He falls asleep. He wakes up and he sees this happening and he's dreaming. He sees this happening.

And then when he wakes up, he says this line, and I think it might be one of the most

nice sentences probably in the whole book of Genesis. It says this, "Surely the Lord is in this

place and I was not aware of it." Nothing arrived while Jacob slept. Nothing changed about the patch

of desert that he was sleeping on. God didn't show up. Jacob woke up. The traffic was already

running. Jacob just woke up in the middle of it. The interesting thing, the Hebrew word here for

place is the word macomb. Just place. Just means place. Like, not super exciting. Just means spot.

Like patch of ground. The rabbis noticed something in historical study of this.

And what they did with it was this ordinary word ends up becoming one of their names for God himself.

Homochom, meaning the place. And if you look at the ancient like Rabbi commentary, they ask,

they're asked why? Why is this the name for God? And the answer they give is because he

is the place of the world and his world is not his place. Like, the world doesn't contain God,

but it is what's holding the world. Part of the story is kind of funny, at least to me,

but I also think it's kind of profound. The verse the rabbis are commenting on,

when have this whole conversation, which when rabbis are having this conversation,

they're debating Scripture. It's called Medrash. I was just talking about that I think with Cody.

There's this like tradition in the Hebrew tradition that you sit down, you argue about what Scripture

means. That's Medrash. We don't like that in the evangelical Christian world. It's like, no,

the Bible's clear. It means this. And then you're like, I don't think so.

I heard something the other day, I may have said this before, but heard something the other day

that like the high school, the kids that took their faith, like, serious high school,

or the WWJD bracelets, the millennials, are now ones that are deconstructing their faith because

they were like, what would Jesus do? And everybody's mad at them and they're like, well, you told me

to ask these questions. And the other part of that is the people that didn't take their faith

seriously in high school are the ones that are really serious about church right now that you're

arguing with on Facebook. They're like, I remember you from high school. Anyway, so there's this

argument thing, this Medrash, this debating about what Scripture is saying. And the rabbis are doing

this. And the verse that they're talking about is this verse, Jacob's verse, he says, it says that

he reached a certain place. The place where the tradition learned to call the place

is from a story about a man who slept through the whole thing. He just fell asleep at the place

and all of a sudden, this is very serious stuff. And Jacob's like, I know, I was here even though I

was asleep. It was pretty funny after this. Like, I love this part. He gets up, he takes his pillow,

he sets it up as little marker, and he renames the place. Like, the town that he was in, they

already had a name that was Loose, L-U-Z, perfectly good name, Ordinary Town. Jacob looks around,

the same dirt he fell asleep on. And he says, you know what? I'm going to call this place.

Bethel. House of God. Now, nothing about the geography changed overnight while Jacob's left there.

The only thing that changed is now somebody knew something. They recognized, they noticed something.

And that's what noticing does. It doesn't make God show up. It renames where you already live.

And the renaming thing that, this renaming thing that already lives, it's kind of funny to be like,

this instinct still exists. The one Jacob had to sleep off, like, it's alive, it's well in the

modern church. There's a whole strain of it, like whole movements whose vocabulary is bringing

the presence of God places, hosting the presence, carrying the presence, taking God to a city,

planting a revival in a region. One of the biggest church movements in America, when I said the

name, you guys are like, oh, I know that name, literally named itself Bethel. Like, just this

week I church announced that there's a brand new location that they're planting in our city.

And the words they use for why they were planting it was, this city needs the presence of God.

And I get it, I get the impulse, but like, I think Jacob would have a word with them, like,

because the entire point of the story where Bethel gets named is that the presence was already in

lose. Before Jacob dreamed, before he woke up, before anybody built anything, planted anything,

put it on a sign, nobody brings God to San Antonio. He isn't missing. He was in this place before

any of us were aware of it. The only thing a church has ever actually brought to a city is its

attention, like, or lack of it. Here's the part I care about the most. And the people most often

told that God's presence isn't with them, or isn't for them, are exactly the people that this

room exists for. The stairway over the sea didn't need planting, it just needs to be noticed.

And as I say this, like, the irony goes even a layer deeper because the city is named for a saint.

San Antonio, like, like, Saint Anthony, he was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He was a Franciscan,

in the Franciscan, like, Catholic order. Saint Anthony was famous in his own lifetime for

like, his preaching, and for preaching where he stood on the side of the poor.

And 800 years later, some of you grew up in the Catholic faith. You know what Saint Anthony's best

known for? He's Saint people prayed to when something's lost. The finder of lost things.

Two years ago, I stood in the cathedral in Lisbon, Saint Anthony was baptized.

And some of you are here when I told this story, the little balcony next to this pipe organ where

I stood and looked over this cathedral. And I felt the smallness in me in the best way possible.

And it gave this whole church language of awe. I didn't know it then that Saint

our city is named for came out of the very room where God got my attention.

So, no, this is not a city that's waiting for the presence of God to show up.

The city was actually found around missions. People were building churches on the river 300

years, but anyone could post anything on Instagram about planting a church.

The building that we take tourists to, and we tell them to remember it was a church.

A city named for the finder of lost things does not need to be told that God has gone missing here.

Nothing in San Antonio is lost, except some days maybe our attention.

And attention is exactly the thing that we can practice. And that's what we're talking about today.

Some of you have heard me do this before. In January I stood up here and I read the story of Moses

at the burning bush. And there's a line in the scripture that we talked about where

Eugene Peterson is a translation that says God saw that he had stopped to look.

Moses was walking and said that God saw that he had stopped to look.

The interesting thing, and I talked about this in January, is the bush was already burning.

It didn't just ignite and catch Moses's attention. It was already on fire.

Just Moses finally noticed it. Jacob's stairway was already standing there.

It didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the same move all through scripture.

What looks like God suddenly showing up is almost always somebody finally noticing that he's already there.

In January I gave you this invitation to slow down, to stop, to look.

Today I want to push it one step further. And this is the pivot they're in at this part in the year of all.

Ideas that noticing is not a mood that happens to you. It's a skill. And its skills can be trained.

And so it's something that I'm asking us to bend to, to practice. If you want to know what noticing

looks like, look at Jesus. If you want to know what like a fully awake human looks like, watch

what he notices. There's a story in in Mark chapter five. Jesus is moving through a crowd.

It's massive crowd. Mark says a crowd isn't just around him. It's pressing him. It's crushing.

Everybody wants proximity to Jesus. Dozens of people are in contact with him

every minute as he's stepping through this crowd. In that crowd there's a woman who's been bleeding

for 12 years. 12 years of doctors, 12 years of being left out. Under purity rules of the culture

of the time, 12 years of being untouchable, unseeable. She has learned to move through the

world without being noticed because being noticed has only ever cost her. I want to slow down for

this just for a second. I don't think we can feel the weight of those 12 years where she sat where

we are now. I know the men definitely can't in this room. 12 years of bleeding is a medical nightmare

by itself. But there was a law sitting on top of that for this woman. In Leviticus 15, a one with

an ongoing discharge is ritually unclean. Not for a week. Every single day that it continues she's

unclean. An uncleanliness under that code was contagious. Her bed unclean, her chair unclean.

Anyone who touched her or even touched what she touched unclean. Which means for 12 years this

woman had been treated as a hazard by her community. No embrace, no shared table, no temple visits.

She was cut off at the very place she would go to beg God for healing. If she'd been married,

this had actually ended that. Rachel held Evans a writer that I love that we've talked about here.

Spent a year actually living the Bible's instructions for women and she wrote a book about it called

A Year of Biblical Womanhood. She spent days when she was writing this book. She was doing the things

and then she was thinking about it and it turned into this book. She spent the days of her cycle

camped in a tent in her front yard just to feel some fraction of what these laws did to women's

actual lighter in that time. She wouldn't go in the house because she was unclean. Her point was

the one that I'm making. These weren't abstract rules for this woman. They decided who got touched,

who didn't, who was welcome and who wasn't. And be honest, like even now in our enlightened age,

right? We still whisper about this conversation. Somebody still like slides the box up their sleeve

at HEB. It's contraband. If Mottie's like, "Hey, can you pick this up from me from the store?" I'm like,

"Oh no. They're going to see me." Someone in this room right now is really uncomfortable that I'm

even mentioning this in church for stage. Right, Robert? So take this like, this whisper that we

live in where I, like, it's hard for me to even go down the aisle and grab tampons and have to walk

up and check out with them, right? Take that whisper, put a legal code on top of it, stretch it across

all of yours. That's who's in this crowd. That's how invisible, invisible was for this woman.

What you, is what makes the touch bravest, quietest thing in the gospels because by law,

uncleanholiness travels upward, touching him should make Jesus unclean. That's the risk.

That's why she's hiding after she does it. And instead fronts in the entire history of this whole

system, it goes the other way. Power goes out. Healing runs down the hem of his clothing.

Jesus doesn't catch her impurity. She catches his wholeness. So she does the bravest, quietest

thing in the gospels. She comes up behind him, hidden in the crushing crowd, and she touches his

clothes. Not him. She touches him. The minimum possible contact she could have.

Healing without actual encounter. Grace anonymously, and then she can slide back into the crowd.

And it works. Mark says she immediately knows in her body that she's free. And then just

stops the whole procession. And Mark records it this way. At once, Jesus realized that power had

gone out from him. He turned around the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"

And it cycles. You see the people crowding against you, right? And yet you ask, "Who touched me?"

You can kind of hear the sass, right? Everyone is touching you. What are you talking about

Jesus? Just one of those teaching moments. Like, the disciples are telling you that

this picture is impossible for him to even know what happened. There's hundreds of contacts,

total knowledge. And Jesus notices the one touch.

Everybody else touched him like a crowd touches a celebrity. Get close, get something gone,

contact no encounter. And one woman touched him with 12 years of hope concentrated in one finger tip.

And that he felt. That's the filter of a fully awake human being, tuned precisely to the person

everyone else's filter deletes. And this is not a one-off. This is just how Jesus' attention works.

If you look at the gospels everywhere you catch him, Nate stood up here weeks ago and he told us

the story of Zacchaeus, a whole crowd. Jesus picks out the man hiding in a tree.

Before Zacchaeus promises anything, this pattern holds throughout the gospels. Whoever the room

has learned not to see, that's exactly where his eyes go. And what she does, because he could have,

he could have let her go. She got what she came for. She had her healing, but he stops. He waits.

And who touched me? She comes trembling out of the crowd. And Mark says, tells him the whole story,

12 years of it. She's like, oh, you want to know? Like, here's what's going on. Out loud,

in public, this hidden woman, she's unhidden, but she still feels safe. There's something about Jesus.

You've heard this room's language all year. She comes abiding. And Jesus looks at a woman,

the whole system has filed under unclean and it, right? As we talked about this with Martin

Boober, a case, a category, something to discard or to file away. And he gives her a name no one

has spoken over her in 12 years. He said to her, daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace

and be freed from your suffering. Daughter. This is a word that takes a person from it

to a vow to becoming something. It started with him noticing the healing through his hymn.

The encounter came because he refused to let her synonymous.

That's because attention is how it becomes a vow.

Can we actually get better at this? Or are some people just born noticers? Like,

the rest of us are doomed to just count basketball pass and we never see the gorilla.

There's one piece of research I'll give you this week and I love it. You guys have heard this name,

Dacker Keltner. He's the psychologist that studies awe. He ran us down what they called awe walks.

I've talked about this before, 50 minutes outside once a week. The only difference between groups

was that they were doing this study with was the instructions they gave. They told them to go on

walks, 15 minutes go outside once a week. And the instruction was walk like it's the first time

you've seen any of this. Look at the big things. Look at the small things. That's it, an attention

instruction. Go for a walk, but I feel like you've never seen this before. Eight weeks later,

the awe walk group wasn't just feeling more awe on the walks. awe began to show up in their ordinary

days outside of those walks. Joy too. Even their photos changed. If you looked at photos, they were

taking photos on their on these awe walks. The photos changed while they were doing it. Over the weeks,

the awe walkers will call that their selfies had less self in them and more world.

They were taking us with the world. It literally started making themselves smaller in their own

pictures without being told to. Same neighborhood, same 15 minutes, same leg, same group. The only

variable was trained attention and the world got bigger on schedule. That's because this emotion

of awe, it isn't a lottery. It isn't reserved for the Grand Canyon or for people with certain

temperance. It's a capacity and it responds to practice like a muscle responds to reps.

It's a trainable skill. The philosophers, Simone Weil, who thought harder about

attention than maybe anyone in the last century. She went even further in this idea of studying

attention. She believed, and I'm paraphrasing her, that attention in its purest, most unmixed form

simply is prayer. In a letter to a friend, a poet who'd been this friend was a poet who'd

been paralyzed in the First World War. Simone Weil wrote this to him. Attention is the rarest

and purest form of generosity. Think about the woman in the crowd. Think about what cost 12

years of invisibility to be seen in that moment. And what it gave her. I think Weil's right,

attention is generosity. Maybe the purest kind. I love how it's prayer. This is what prayer is.

When you truly notice someone, you hand them the one thing everyone is starving for to just be seen.

Master, I told you, you're already practicing things. You didn't just pick up mo your practices.

You grab your phone. We talked about it. Your attention is pulled somewhere. The filter we've

been talking about all morning, the thing why calls generosity, the thing that turns it into

thou. The thing that woke Jacob up is the single most fought over resource on planet earth.

There are rooms full of very smart people who are paid very, very well to decide what you notice

next. Every scroll, every badge, every red dot, everything that you that pulls you into your phone.

It's training. Hear me carefully. This is not a shame thing. Like we pull the phones out in my

screen times probably longer than most of yours. It's okay. You're not weak. You're up against a

system designed by people who understand the gorilla video better than anybody. It's aiming

your filter purpose at outrage, at comparison, at needing more. The question isn't whether your

attention is being trained. It is today, the question in this series, what are you practicing

and did you pick it? The assignment for this week, the first real practice

series, I'm going to give you one practice for us all to do. It's fun underneath, like I said,

everything else that we'll talk about during this series. It's the one that Dacker Keltner

simple on. One awak, 15 minutes aside, phone stays home or stays in your pocket completely.

One time this week, not daily, not a morning routine like once between now and Sunday.

And on that walk, there's one instruction, the same one from the student that Keltner did.

Walk like it's the first time you've ever seen any of it. The light on the wall,

the flower, the bird doing the weirding and the tree, the tiny hooks on the bird.

You're not trying to make anything happen. You're practicing looking.

It feels nothing happens on your walk. That's fine. Remember the rule. Nothing happened.

There's no board. You took a walk. Like worst case, you got 15 minutes of fresh air. The data

says even that is a gift. But what I suspect is somewhere in those 15 minutes, maybe not the first

walk. Maybe it's the fourth week from now. You're going to catch it. Some completely ordinary patch

of your completely ordinary neighborhood is going to go quietly luminous for you. And Jacob's sentence

is going to climb out of your chest before you decide to say it. God was in this place and I was

not aware of it. The stairway is already standing. The traffic already running. The bush has been

burning the whole time. The world is already lit. You were made to be a conduit and a representation

of love made to practice love. And love starts with noticing. And so the call for this week is to

go notice. Is the awe of the Lord that leads us to wisdom. Let's go to the sweet. Go experience

some awe. And when you notice, it will give you the opportunity to love. And that's how we talk

every great. That's how we end it. Our song will go love well. It's who you're made to be. You

can notice first. So go do that. Love you guys. We'll see you next week.