From Jerry Sittser and his book “the Will of God as a Way of Life:
To make life itself an art—that is the goal of living in the present moment. We do not have to join an Amish community to live this way. Most of us are too entangled in the modern world to drop out anyway. We own homes in cities of suburbs, work in large institutions, and depend on technology for survival. We live by the clock and keep long hours. The world is in us as much as we are in the world. Yet the ordinary tasks we do every day are alive with the presence and power of God, if we have the eye to see it. They constitute the “sacrament of the present moment,” as Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote.
How can we turn ordinary living, as busy and crazy as it is, into an art? I just learned that Ernest Hemmingway quit writing at noon every day, even when he was in the middle of a sentence, in order to go fishing in the afternoon. C.S. Lewis took daily walks and answered every letter he received, though he could have easily excused himself from the responsibility. Suzannah Wesley, who raised nineteen children (including John and Charles, who became the leaders of the first great awakening in England), spent an hour a week with each child individually. Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota and The Cloister Walk, spends time every year in Benedictine monastery, where she follows Benedict’s Rule. Dale Bruner, a retired Whitworth professor, reads classic literature every evening. These disciplines refresh and restore, enabling those who practice them to return to their busy lives with renewed creativity, perspective, and gratitude.
It is especially difficult to turn our work into an art using it as a means of living life for God in the present moment. Work requires efficiency and productivity. The pleasure we want to receive is subservient to the result we must achieve. How we perform is the means; what we accomplish is the end. Yet we can see our work as sacred, too. A recent graduate of Whitworth wrote to tell me how he has changed his attitude toward teaching high school history. “God has been showing me how I can serve and glorify him in all things, even when I am planning lessons and grading papers. . . . I feel like the divisions between what is ‘spiritual’ or ‘ministry’ and what is secular has disappeared. I feel like the sacred has expanded to cover all life, and this doesn’t dirty the meaning of sacred but broadens my understanding of it instead. I feel much more like I am about God’s business in everything.~Jerry Sittser the Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2000,2004) p 152-53 . . . .continued
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