I am not very good at chess, in fact that is a serious understatement, I am terrible. And yet next to my 11-year-old boy I am a budding genius. It is not that he is a poor player, it is just that he plays with a serious case of inattentiveness.
Pawns are miss-moved, bishops are taken, castles are felled and Kings are checkmated, all in rapid record time. His inattention to the details of the game is quite astounding bordering on pure comedy. In fact we often laugh about it together in the aftermath.
Playing chess with a blatant disregard for attention it must be said, isn’t going to impact your life with that much of a consequence.
Living your day-to-day however, with a similar lack of attentiveness could prove fatal.
Living attentively
Jesus encouraged his disciples, and thereby each one of us, to watch and pray. To focus and remain aware of the changing face of the times and seasons around them, so as not to be misled by the development of various occurrences.
In short it was a call to live attentively.
Life can be a maze, it can be a mess. It can be sublimely exciting as well dreadfully excruciating, often frustrating, many times delightful.
But whatever, however…life is always a wonder. There is a sacredness in life that is not inherent in anything else. It cannot be produced or manufactured it merely has to be lived, experienced and then enjoyed.
When Jesus pointed to the lilies of the fields and the birds of the air, he was indicating the unsurpassable wonder held in the minutest detail of life.
We live with the wow and the wonder that is locked into every scene, conversation, person that we meet, places that we visit.
From a heavenly perspective there is no such thing as a wasted moment, as killing time.
Our moments are often the unperceived glimpses of great wonder. It is the moments that life is made up of and how often we waste them assuming they are simply periods of unwanted waiting.
Similarly time is never to be killed by idle, inattentive waiting. Time is to be utilised, savoured and enjoyed. For every moment that passes is a moment that will not return in quite the same way as it left.
This is why the Scriptures encourage us to “redeem the time”. It is why the writer of Ecclesiastes speaks of a time for every season and moment under heaven, as if the sheer preciousness of a moment, deserves a specific allocation of time.
The wealth that is around us
We all live sublimely rich lives, surrounded by the most inexpressible wealth and beauty on a daily, hourly basis.
And yet so often we live as paupers inattentively wandering through our chess games, allowing our castles, bishops and pawns to be felled and removed.
Every day you and I live never comes back to us in the same way. As certain as every single hair on our head is individually crafted, so every minute of every day is a unique piece of work, an eternal monument to the sacredness of the moment.
When you draw back the curtains this morning and greet a new day, irrespective of the night before, week before….breathe in its uniqueness, behold it’s staggering, incompatible beauty.
It is something that has never happened before and will never happen again, this unique, divinely crafted 24 hours!
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