Ford Attentive Life

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9644-8
Verlag: IVP Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 229 Seiten

Your attention, please.That's what God wants, Leighton Ford discovered. It's the path to becoming like Christ.Distractions, fear and busyness were keeping Ford from seeing God's work in and around him. He was missing God. So he began a journey of longing and looking for God. And it started with paying attention.In these pages, he invites you to journey with him. Using the rich monastic tradition of praying the hours, Ford will walk with you, helping you pay attention to God's work in you and around you throughout each day and in different seasons of your life.If you're busy, distracted, rushing through each day, you might be feeling disconnected from God, unable to see how he's working. You might be missing him. But the way toward him starts with a pause and a prayer-with intention and attention-and becomes a way of life, awake and alive to the peaceful, powerful presence of God.

Leighton Ford is president of Leighton Ford Ministries, which seeks to help young leaders worldwide to lead more like Jesus. For many years, Ford communicated Christ around the globe through speaking, writing and media outreach with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, includingTransforming Leadership.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ford, Leighton

Leseproben

An Introduction

Short Flights and Quick Returns

I am sitting on a bench at Lost Lagoon, on the edge of the hundreds and hundreds of acres of trees and trails that make up the vast Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. Behind me are the tall buildings of the city. Surrounding the park on three sides are the waters of English Bay and Burrard Inlet. In the background, clouds hover over the mountains that slope down to frame Vancouver—my favorite city in the world, at least to visit.

For much of the past decade and a half I have been coming here for a summertime pilgrimage. I call it a pilgrimage not because Vancouver is such a holy place but because I can get away from my usual routines and hopefully resharpen my attentiveness and imagination.

It is a lazy midsummer afternoon, and I am alone on my spectator’s perch except for a few ducks in the grass by the water’s edge and some bicycle riders on the path behind me. Around the lagoon several couples are walking hand in hand.

My eye is drawn to the fountain spouting up in the center of the lagoon; from there a flight of birds take off in a perfect V-formation. They disappear, then in a few minutes come circling back, and still in formation splash down, their legs extended like the landing gears of the seaplanes descending at nearby Coal Harbor.

I think,

As I watch their landing and muse on its symbolism, a seagull comes and sits just by my foot for a minute or two as if to say: “Pay attention now. This show is for you to notice.” It is a message from the birds.

Watching these birds take off and land takes my thoughts back to when we began a new ministry of spiritual mentoring for young leaders. At our very first board meeting the chairman asked me a penetrating question: “What can do that is unique?” His second was even more pointed: “Do you think you are doing something significant when—or when—you are traveling, going someplace?”

His question went straight to my heart. Whether short flights or longer ones, much of my life has been spent in going to more than forty countries in ministry as an evangelist and preacher or on special assignment. Now that is changing. I realize that life for me will mean not always being on the go. There will be—like the flight of the birds—more short flights and quick returns.

My work has largely focused on evangelism—“making friends for God,” as I like to put it. But a shift has taken place. Not from evangelism, for I am and always want to be one who shares the good news of Jesus Christ. But now is a time to pay more attention to my own heart, to deepen my own friendship with God and to walk with others who want to do the same.

Vancouver itself has been one of the “busy” places I have flown to across the years, as I have preached here in citywide meetings, led a mission at the university, taught seminars for young leaders. So it is fitting that around the time of my first sabbatical summer here, was beginning to matter to me. Here I discovered a new interest in drawing and painting—in learning to pay attention to what is around me.

At the same time I was trying to pay attention in new ways to what is inside me. I read Annie Dillard’s and was struck by the way she stalked the fish in a stream near her house in the Virginia countryside. She described how she learned to watch for fish from an oblique angle, where her shadow would not make them shy away. The phrase “stalking my soul” came to me then and has stuck in my imagination.

“We shall not cease from exploration.” This could be a companion word from T. S. Eliot about such stalking, and those words stay with me too. It has been fascinating through the years to explore many parts of the world. Now there is still exploration to be done, and one of the reasons I have written this book and want to share it with you is that we should all be explorers, always, in all things.

Longing and Looking

Each of us is part of a Greater Story, and behind our stories is a Storyteller calling us home. The deepest longing I have is to come home to my own heart, so in a sense I am writing this book for myself. But it is not just about me, for I believe all our stories are of longing and of looking.

That has become very clear to me as I reread the notes and journals I have written in recent years. For many years “journey” was a call to go as I traveled the world in ministry. “Home” was an equally powerful inner voice calling me to stay, to be rooted. Now I realize that these were not only two ways I spent my time but also a response to two notes in my own song: the lure of the road and the call to home.

The call was to be “home on the road,” to bring my real self before the real God, to be changed into his true image, to become all that God has made me to be. It was and is a longing to belong, to have a home for God in my heart.

This sense of longing runs like an underground river through the writings of many observers of the human condition, like the novelist Walker Percy. A character in his the lapsed Catholic psychiatrist Tom More, sits in a sand trap on a golf course and muses, “The sand trap and the clouds put me in mind of being ten years old and in love and full of longing. The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing.”

Yet why do I so often hide from this longing? Spiritual inattentiveness, I believe, comes in large part from our fear of being known for who we really are. Often we keep ourselves busy and distracted because we fear that if we slow down and are still, we may look inside and find nothing there.

If the first part of my own journey involved , the second has encompassed mainly —coming to terms with important parts of my soul, bringing my real self before the real God, and discovering prayer, as Simone Weil put it, as “absolute attention.”

This book is about attentiveness, not simply as a path to self-fulfillment but as the very essence of our journey to the Center—as the way home to our own heart, the way of making our heart a home for God. So I am writing for myself, to identify waymarks for my own second journey but also for others who are walking the path with Christ, or searching for the path to Christ, so we may walk it together.

I have noticed in my own experience how the vocational journey and the personal journey intertwine. What God is doing in both is similar, very much like the interweaving of the intricate strands in a Celtic cord, a work of art designed to show how God is at work weaving the inner and outer parts of our lives into a unified pattern.

In this “second journey” I have sensed a strong call to be an artist of the soul and a friend on the journey, especially to younger men and women, and others, who seek to be led by Jesus, to lead like him and to lead to him, and who have a hunger to be whole people.

Each of us is called to a life patterned by Christ. A life not shaped by inner compulsions, or captive to outer expectations, but drawn by the inner voice of love. To listen to this voice, we need to pay careful attention to where our inner and outer selves disconnect and where they need to come together in a beautiful pattern that reflects Jesus, whose inner life with his Father and outer life of ministering to others were very much one.

To walk this path home, and to be a companion to others on the journey, I need to learn both to be still and to go (or grow) deeper. T. S. Eliot wrote that “old men ought to be explorers. . . . We must be still and be moving.” I do not feel old yet! But I do realize that this life stage requires not so much as

There are periods in which we are mostly active and outwardly focused. And there are times in which we become more reflective, when we move more from action to being acted upon. The latter time may well come as we get older. But this is not a book about aging; it is about learning how we may become more attuned to the still, small voice of God in all the seasons of our lives.

What Will We Pay Attention To?

In the rest of this book we will explore together various aspects of attentiveness as a special lens through which to look at our lives.

We will look at attentiveness itself: what is it, and why is it important?

We will see God as the Great Attender, the One who pays attention and calls us to attention.

We will look at the of our lives, whether the hours of our days (marked by the classical “prayer hours”) or the various seasons of life and our spiritual journey, and the kind of attentiveness that each phase calls for:

• the “morning” journey, when our day starts and where our life begins with all its potential and challenges
• the “midday” journey, when we are flung headlong into the busyness of life, which lures us onto the open road but may also engender a sense of having lost our way
• the “afternoon” time, when we set out in earnest on an inner journey because we know we have limited time and are heading for home
• the “evening” journey, the conscious transition from afternoon to the time when the shadows lengthen and evening falls, the time to find a way to live with a quieted...