WEBVTT 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:25.180 hey, we are continuing our series Unforced this week. Unforced. We're talking about the 00:00:25.180 --> 00:00:39.100 unforced rhythms of grace. And so I'm gonna dive in real quick. It's funny when I'm riding these 00:00:39.100 --> 00:00:43.340 things, there's always something comes up that's like, oh, that'll be good for this. And last 00:00:43.340 --> 00:00:51.900 night it came up at like 11.30. Last night we were sitting in the living, we just gotten back to the 00:00:51.900 --> 00:01:03.860 house from actually moving Jaden, our 21 year old into his first apartment. Yeah, I know, it's 00:01:03.860 --> 00:01:16.140 sad. I've got a, his room's gonna be my theater room now. Just kidding. I'm just kidding. We have 00:01:16.140 --> 00:01:26.060 too many kids for that. As we were packing up Jaden's stuff and moving it out, out of his room, 00:01:26.060 --> 00:01:34.140 the kids were moving their stuff into the room. It was like that. So, we moved out, we got home, 00:01:34.140 --> 00:01:41.460 moved out, moved in, which he moved into like these like college apartments and we got there and 00:01:41.460 --> 00:01:46.260 the apartment was disgusting. I was like, you didn't even clean? Like, they didn't clean this before you 00:01:46.260 --> 00:02:05.420 got here? Just not nice. But, um, his mom's body and his mom Bethany and all the daughters went to the store and 00:02:05.420 --> 00:02:12.940 bought all kinds of stuff. So, I'll be paying for that for a few months. Came back with these bags and 00:02:12.940 --> 00:02:16.700 like hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. And I was like, I thought you said this was his moment to 00:02:16.700 --> 00:02:24.420 spread his wings and fly. But yeah, we're setting it up, bring him up. I was ready to be like, good luck, 00:02:24.420 --> 00:02:34.620 bro. But anyway, we dropped him off, got him all set up. He's good. Excited for him. He did say he's 00:02:34.620 --> 00:02:40.860 gonna be back, which I don't know what that means. But we'll find out. We got back last night, we're 00:02:40.860 --> 00:02:47.420 sitting, I was sitting in the living room and my body had gone up to a yard of bed and our 11 00:02:47.420 --> 00:02:52.380 year old came downstairs. And we've schools back in the shin, right? So, we've implemented like 00:02:55.260 --> 00:03:01.580 device time limits. So, you just can't be on your device forever. So, now that he doesn't have his 00:03:01.580 --> 00:03:07.740 iPad all the time, he like comes down and wants to talk, which is cool. So, Jet came down and we 00:03:07.740 --> 00:03:17.300 started talking and Jet and I fell down a rabbit hole together. It started with one, one science 00:03:17.300 --> 00:03:24.020 question. Jet's the kind of kid who asks like the real questions. And, uh, why don't I try not to 00:03:24.020 --> 00:03:31.020 hold back much? We're like, all right, here we go. We're gonna have this conversation. And so we 00:03:31.020 --> 00:03:36.700 just went and we won't talk about the original stuff. It's a long story. But we got to a point 00:03:36.700 --> 00:03:43.900 where like how animals are born, why some animals carry their babies inside and some lay eggs and 00:03:43.900 --> 00:03:50.780 then walk away or what how all of that happens. We talked about DNA. What's actually happening 00:03:50.780 --> 00:03:59.020 inside of a mother's body while a baby's being built. And somehow Jet and I don't know are both 00:03:59.020 --> 00:04:06.700 super ADHD. So, you know how these conversations move maybe. We're deep in the animal kingdom at 00:04:06.700 --> 00:04:13.020 this point, right? Um, Mottie comes down. We're watching videos on YouTube because I'm kind of 00:04:13.020 --> 00:04:16.860 answered. I'm like, let's just watch the video. And so, we're watching videos on YouTube. We're 00:04:16.860 --> 00:04:20.300 watching ones about Aragorn Falcon, which if you don't know this, and if you've been here a while, 00:04:20.300 --> 00:04:25.660 you do, but that's by far my favorite animal world. Um, so watching this video on the 00:04:25.660 --> 00:04:33.820 Peregrine Falcon and how we're learning about how engineers spent like whole careers studying this 00:04:33.820 --> 00:04:42.140 bird and how it survives a 200 mile an hour dive. And it dives silently enough. It can 00:04:42.780 --> 00:04:47.660 catch another bird in the air in order to feed itself. There's a picture where they actually took 00:04:47.660 --> 00:04:54.700 this bird and there's theory that engineers actually studied the way that the bird dives 00:04:54.700 --> 00:05:01.660 to find out how it so silently and so quickly, um, and it influenced how the, uh, B2's bomber was 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:11.260 created. Um, and so we're watching that. Watch this thing about slime mold and slime, it's like this 00:05:11.260 --> 00:05:19.340 like brainless yellow goo that scientists in Japan let loose on the map of Tokyo. They like out, 00:05:19.340 --> 00:05:25.500 they created the map Tokyo, they took oats, which apparently slime mold loves. Um, I didn't 00:05:25.500 --> 00:05:31.180 do that, but they took oats and they put oats where like major hubs were in Tokyo and they put the 00:05:31.180 --> 00:05:35.900 slime mold on, on this little dish and they studied how the slime mold moved. See how it would move 00:05:35.900 --> 00:05:43.660 from major hub to major hub. And it grew itself into a near copy of the Tokyo rail system, 00:05:44.540 --> 00:05:50.060 which is one of the most efficient rail systems in the world. And so it showed them sufficient 00:05:50.060 --> 00:05:54.700 ways to connect from one point to another on the map. Like engineers took notes on what the goo is 00:05:54.700 --> 00:05:59.820 doing to do this at another point. Like, look at this, it's crazy. You should look it up. It's 00:05:59.820 --> 00:06:09.500 fascinating, but let me not wrap up too much here. It turns out like with all of this, what happened 00:06:09.500 --> 00:06:16.540 and just so, you know, the Tokyo, the actual Tokyo network on the bottom was already done. 00:06:16.540 --> 00:06:20.380 They had already created it, but they wanted to see if the mold would find a better way. And you 00:06:20.380 --> 00:06:27.180 can see that they're really similar. It's saying stuff, but it turns out there's a whole discipline 00:06:27.180 --> 00:06:35.740 for this. It's called bio mimicry. Bio mimicry is the practice of learning from and mimicking the 00:06:35.740 --> 00:06:44.300 strategies, forms and practices, processes of nature to solve human design and engineering problems. 00:06:45.740 --> 00:06:50.940 Look it up. You might go die, but hold that I went down. It's fascinating. They're building 00:06:50.940 --> 00:06:59.100 buildings that can die now. You're like, what? It though that when they die, they go into like, 00:06:59.100 --> 00:07:06.220 it creates this. It's a whole thing. Anyway, okay. Just so you guys know, I'm off my meds for a 00:07:06.220 --> 00:07:15.260 couple of weeks. You're on, you're all noticing this, aren't you? And now, let me, let me, 00:07:16.220 --> 00:07:22.860 11th at night, jets meds have worn off. I'm off my meds. Mottie comes downstairs. 00:07:24.060 --> 00:07:28.940 Mottie walks downstairs and we're watching mold grow on the TV and she's like, what is happening? 00:07:29.100 --> 00:07:36.220 Anyway, I'm not going to run you all the way down the rabbit hole that we went on, 00:07:36.220 --> 00:07:41.980 but I do want to talk about a fascinating bio mimicry story that has probably, not probably, 00:07:41.980 --> 00:07:47.980 it has absolutely affected literally everyone in this room. It come in 1940s from a Swiss engineer. 00:07:47.980 --> 00:07:55.660 The Swiss engineer's name is George de Mistral. And the story goes that George was out on a walk. 00:07:56.220 --> 00:08:02.460 He's walking in the mountains with his dog. And when he got home, the dog is covered in burrs. 00:08:03.980 --> 00:08:08.460 The coat, he's his dog. He's like little burrs. You guys know him. We live in South Texas. If you 00:08:08.460 --> 00:08:11.980 walk through like high grass, you come home, your socks are covered and the little stickers, the 00:08:11.980 --> 00:08:18.940 burrs, right? So his dog's covered in burrs. He gets home, dogs covered in pants, socks, whatever. 00:08:18.940 --> 00:08:25.660 He's got burrs everywhere. Every single person in history, if you've walked through this, you've 00:08:25.660 --> 00:08:33.660 done this, you come home, you do the same thing. You pull the burrs off, you grumble, you complain, 00:08:33.660 --> 00:08:40.060 you throw them away and then you move on. Well, not de Mistral. He did was he put one of those 00:08:40.060 --> 00:08:45.020 under a microscope. He's like, what is this thing? Why is it doing this? And what he saw was there 00:08:45.020 --> 00:08:52.620 were thousands of tiny hooks grabbing anything that had some form of a loop. And because he looked, 00:08:54.140 --> 00:08:59.980 your kids can wear shoes that you don't have to tie. Because what came of that, 00:09:01.260 --> 00:09:07.820 burrs and dogs hair is a thing called the crow. He looked at how the burrs hooked into a loop and 00:09:07.820 --> 00:09:14.380 was like, oh, this like holds really strong, strong enough like the astronauts in NASA to keep things 00:09:14.380 --> 00:09:20.940 together. Like Velcro is incredible. And it came from nature. It's a biomimicry process where he 00:09:20.940 --> 00:09:26.300 looked at biology, looked at nature, mimicked it. The interesting thing is the burr was always 00:09:26.300 --> 00:09:33.180 sticky. It would always grab onto something, but someone finally looked to figure out how it worked. 00:09:35.420 --> 00:09:39.900 And here's what got me while I'm sitting here chatting with, with Jett and Mottie has now joined 00:09:39.900 --> 00:09:45.900 the conversation. She's just eyes wide open like what is happening. Like I said, came in mid 00:09:45.900 --> 00:09:54.540 ADHD deep into the rabbit hole of nature and babies. And the interesting thing is the burr 00:09:54.540 --> 00:10:01.260 didn't change, right? Nature wasn't hiding anything. The answer was stuck to every dog in Europe. 00:10:01.260 --> 00:10:06.780 Everybody that went on a walk like this, this guy did. The whole difference became 00:10:08.220 --> 00:10:17.260 not just the annoyance, but it became this invention that one man died to pay attention 00:10:17.260 --> 00:10:23.900 to a thing that everybody else brushed off. And honestly, like just a side note, if I'm honest, 00:10:24.700 --> 00:10:28.780 I've learned more in a lot of years of following this kid's curiosity than he has ever learned 00:10:28.780 --> 00:10:38.860 from my answers. That's why we watch YouTube. So here's how many good morning. What if this whole 00:10:38.860 --> 00:10:49.020 idea is not just how inventions work, but what if this is how faith works? And I'm gonna give a 00:10:49.020 --> 00:10:53.340 quick thing from last year, disclaimer before we go on. I gave you an assignment who did the 00:10:53.340 --> 00:11:01.180 assignment. I'm just kidding. Don't raise your hand. That's the, well, you fail. I'm just kidding. 00:11:01.900 --> 00:11:05.660 I gave you an assignment last week, one practice, smallest possible version of whatever practice 00:11:05.660 --> 00:11:11.020 that was. And I'm gonna handle this the way that we're gonna handle everything throughout this 00:11:11.020 --> 00:11:16.140 series every single week. So get used to this rhythm. I'm not really, I wasn't asking for hands. 00:11:16.140 --> 00:11:21.820 I'm not asking for how it went. There's no report that's who, if you did your small thing, 00:11:23.100 --> 00:11:30.940 good. Not like good job. Like just good. You did it. Something quiet got practice. And if you didn't, 00:11:30.940 --> 00:11:37.900 then nothing happened. Like you didn't fall behind. There's no behind. There's no score board. 00:11:37.900 --> 00:11:43.180 You didn't get moved down the scoreboard. The entire point of last week was nothing happens 00:11:44.700 --> 00:11:51.020 even if you miss it. That's not the point of it. A practice is something you can pick back up 00:11:51.020 --> 00:11:58.060 without penalty. There's no loophole. And so what we're talking about, we're gonna look at what 00:11:58.060 --> 00:12:03.980 practice is and not performance and not a scoreboard. So this week, the first actual practice that 00:12:03.980 --> 00:12:08.060 we're gonna talk about is one that is gonna underlie everything talked about during this 00:12:08.060 --> 00:12:14.700 unforced series for the next, I think six or seven weeks. So here we go. Some of you are so 00:12:14.700 --> 00:12:24.220 mad at me about this gorilla. There's a picture a few months ago, I showed you a video and I told 00:12:24.220 --> 00:12:31.100 you to count the passes, the basketball passes between the people in the white shirts. And you're 00:12:31.100 --> 00:12:33.580 watching, I don't know, I think there's people in the black, yeah, people in the black shirts 00:12:34.380 --> 00:12:38.220 as they pass. You were supposed to count how many passes there were. In half of the room 00:12:39.180 --> 00:12:43.580 they're directly at a person in a grille suit as they walked through the chaos and they never saw 00:12:43.580 --> 00:12:48.380 the person because when it was over, it's like how passes were there and they're like 15 and like 00:12:48.380 --> 00:12:55.500 awesome, you did great. Now who saw the grill? And people were like, what? And literally he just, 00:12:55.500 --> 00:13:01.900 the gorilla actually walked, stood in the middle, beat its chest, and then walked, walked off and 00:13:01.900 --> 00:13:08.940 half the room didn't see it, which is normal. This is a psychology test. And the reason I keep 00:13:08.940 --> 00:13:14.460 bringing it up is we're going to talk about attention and your attention is not, it's not a window, 00:13:14.460 --> 00:13:22.060 it's a feeling. You don't see the world, you see what you're looking for. So whatever your 00:13:22.060 --> 00:13:27.820 attention is tuned to, that's the world that you live in. We've talked about it. If you're tuned 00:13:27.820 --> 00:13:33.740 to threats, you live in a threatening world. If you're tuned to what's missing, you live in scarcity. 00:13:34.540 --> 00:13:40.780 Tune to your phone, you live in your phone. You don't see the world, you see what you're looking 00:13:40.780 --> 00:13:49.660 for. Nobody experiences everything because everybody's running a filter, which is a question that I 00:13:49.660 --> 00:13:57.340 want to sit with this morning. The question is, what is your filter doing to God? There's a story 00:13:57.340 --> 00:14:02.940 in Genesis that I've never actually preached in 11 years of this church, which are 10 years, almost 00:14:04.540 --> 00:14:08.300 that I found kind of interesting that I never talked about it, but we're going to talk about it. 00:14:09.260 --> 00:14:15.420 So Jacob, there's two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob is on the run. He's conned his brother, 00:14:15.420 --> 00:14:18.780 he actually went in, he tricked his dad into giving him the inheritance that his brother was 00:14:18.780 --> 00:14:23.820 supposed to get. It's pretty interesting. He put animal hair on his own because his brother's really 00:14:23.820 --> 00:14:28.860 hairy and his dad couldn't see, and so he tricked him. He was like, "Oh, look, it's me. I'm the hairy 00:14:28.860 --> 00:14:36.300 guy." But he conned his brother, the family has detonated, everybody's upset, and his brother Esau 00:14:36.300 --> 00:14:42.540 has stated plans that he's going to kill him. So Jacob is fleeing. He's running across the country, 00:14:42.540 --> 00:14:48.940 he's alone, it gets dark in the middle of nowhere. There's no tent, no camp, and he finds a rock. 00:14:50.460 --> 00:14:52.780 He puts it under his head and uses it as a pillow. 00:14:54.700 --> 00:15:00.300 And the detail of that is a text, and that's how you know how alone he was, 00:15:00.300 --> 00:15:08.380 as he puts a rocker's head and he passes out. So it says this, Jacob beers Sheba and set out to 00:15:08.380 --> 00:15:13.820 Huron. When he reached a certain place, he stopped night because the sun had set. Taking one of the 00:15:13.820 --> 00:15:18.620 stones there, he put it under his head and he lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a 00:15:18.620 --> 00:15:25.260 stairway resting on the earth with his top reaching to heaven and the angels of God were ascending and 00:15:25.260 --> 00:15:37.180 descending on it. There above it stood the Lord. Notice what this dream is not. When he starts to 00:15:37.180 --> 00:15:41.420 have at the dream, this is not a dream of heaven cracking open for special visit and something 00:15:41.420 --> 00:15:46.780 comes down, like the staircase comes down, and then because the stairway is already resting on the earth. 00:15:48.380 --> 00:15:54.780 The angels are already ascending, descending. All right. He comes into this thing mid-ship, 00:15:54.780 --> 00:16:01.180 right? They're going. There's ongoing traffic between heaven and earth. And Jacob has camped 00:16:01.180 --> 00:16:05.900 in the middle of the interchange without knowing it. He lay down. He had no idea what was going on. 00:16:05.900 --> 00:16:11.100 He falls asleep. He wakes up and he sees this happening and he's dreaming. He sees this happening. 00:16:11.100 --> 00:16:13.980 And then when he wakes up, he says this line, and I think it might be one of the most 00:16:13.980 --> 00:16:18.700 nice sentences probably in the whole book of Genesis. It says this, "Surely the Lord is in this 00:16:18.700 --> 00:16:29.580 place and I was not aware of it." Nothing arrived while Jacob slept. Nothing changed about the patch 00:16:29.580 --> 00:16:36.460 of desert that he was sleeping on. God didn't show up. Jacob woke up. The traffic was already 00:16:36.460 --> 00:16:42.300 running. Jacob just woke up in the middle of it. The interesting thing, the Hebrew word here for 00:16:42.300 --> 00:16:50.700 place is the word macomb. Just place. Just means place. Like, not super exciting. Just means spot. 00:16:50.700 --> 00:16:57.020 Like patch of ground. The rabbis noticed something in historical study of this. 00:16:57.900 --> 00:17:03.660 And what they did with it was this ordinary word ends up becoming one of their names for God himself. 00:17:04.700 --> 00:17:14.060 Homochom, meaning the place. And if you look at the ancient like Rabbi commentary, they ask, 00:17:14.060 --> 00:17:21.340 they're asked why? Why is this the name for God? And the answer they give is because he 00:17:22.060 --> 00:17:29.740 is the place of the world and his world is not his place. Like, the world doesn't contain God, 00:17:31.180 --> 00:17:41.260 but it is what's holding the world. Part of the story is kind of funny, at least to me, 00:17:41.260 --> 00:17:45.660 but I also think it's kind of profound. The verse the rabbis are commenting on, 00:17:45.660 --> 00:17:48.940 when have this whole conversation, which when rabbis are having this conversation, 00:17:48.940 --> 00:17:54.700 they're debating Scripture. It's called Medrash. I was just talking about that I think with Cody. 00:17:54.700 --> 00:18:02.060 There's this like tradition in the Hebrew tradition that you sit down, you argue about what Scripture 00:18:02.060 --> 00:18:08.860 means. That's Medrash. We don't like that in the evangelical Christian world. It's like, no, 00:18:08.860 --> 00:18:13.660 the Bible's clear. It means this. And then you're like, I don't think so. 00:18:16.220 --> 00:18:19.260 I heard something the other day, I may have said this before, but heard something the other day 00:18:19.260 --> 00:18:25.180 that like the high school, the kids that took their faith, like, serious high school, 00:18:25.180 --> 00:18:31.020 or the WWJD bracelets, the millennials, are now ones that are deconstructing their faith because 00:18:31.020 --> 00:18:36.860 they were like, what would Jesus do? And everybody's mad at them and they're like, well, you told me 00:18:36.860 --> 00:18:41.740 to ask these questions. And the other part of that is the people that didn't take their faith 00:18:41.740 --> 00:18:45.740 seriously in high school are the ones that are really serious about church right now that you're 00:18:45.740 --> 00:18:53.980 arguing with on Facebook. They're like, I remember you from high school. Anyway, so there's this 00:18:53.980 --> 00:19:01.260 argument thing, this Medrash, this debating about what Scripture is saying. And the rabbis are doing 00:19:01.260 --> 00:19:06.940 this. And the verse that they're talking about is this verse, Jacob's verse, he says, it says that 00:19:06.940 --> 00:19:15.660 he reached a certain place. The place where the tradition learned to call the place 00:19:17.260 --> 00:19:24.700 is from a story about a man who slept through the whole thing. He just fell asleep at the place 00:19:24.700 --> 00:19:33.180 and all of a sudden, this is very serious stuff. And Jacob's like, I know, I was here even though I 00:19:33.180 --> 00:19:42.460 was asleep. It was pretty funny after this. Like, I love this part. He gets up, he takes his pillow, 00:19:43.020 --> 00:19:50.220 he sets it up as little marker, and he renames the place. Like, the town that he was in, they 00:19:50.220 --> 00:19:57.180 already had a name that was Loose, L-U-Z, perfectly good name, Ordinary Town. Jacob looks around, 00:19:58.060 --> 00:20:03.020 the same dirt he fell asleep on. And he says, you know what? I'm going to call this place. 00:20:03.660 --> 00:20:12.460 Bethel. House of God. Now, nothing about the geography changed overnight while Jacob's left there. 00:20:13.980 --> 00:20:21.340 The only thing that changed is now somebody knew something. They recognized, they noticed something. 00:20:23.020 --> 00:20:32.460 And that's what noticing does. It doesn't make God show up. It renames where you already live. 00:20:33.740 --> 00:20:40.300 And the renaming thing that, this renaming thing that already lives, it's kind of funny to be like, 00:20:41.180 --> 00:20:49.340 this instinct still exists. The one Jacob had to sleep off, like, it's alive, it's well in the 00:20:49.340 --> 00:20:55.100 modern church. There's a whole strain of it, like whole movements whose vocabulary is bringing 00:20:55.100 --> 00:21:02.780 the presence of God places, hosting the presence, carrying the presence, taking God to a city, 00:21:02.780 --> 00:21:07.820 planting a revival in a region. One of the biggest church movements in America, when I said the 00:21:07.820 --> 00:21:13.580 name, you guys are like, oh, I know that name, literally named itself Bethel. Like, just this 00:21:13.580 --> 00:21:18.300 week I church announced that there's a brand new location that they're planting in our city. 00:21:19.100 --> 00:21:23.260 And the words they use for why they were planting it was, this city needs the presence of God. 00:21:25.100 --> 00:21:29.740 And I get it, I get the impulse, but like, I think Jacob would have a word with them, like, 00:21:30.700 --> 00:21:35.180 because the entire point of the story where Bethel gets named is that the presence was already in 00:21:35.180 --> 00:21:41.020 lose. Before Jacob dreamed, before he woke up, before anybody built anything, planted anything, 00:21:41.020 --> 00:21:50.220 put it on a sign, nobody brings God to San Antonio. He isn't missing. He was in this place before 00:21:50.220 --> 00:21:56.620 any of us were aware of it. The only thing a church has ever actually brought to a city is its 00:21:56.620 --> 00:22:03.020 attention, like, or lack of it. Here's the part I care about the most. And the people most often 00:22:03.020 --> 00:22:07.980 told that God's presence isn't with them, or isn't for them, are exactly the people that this 00:22:07.980 --> 00:22:14.620 room exists for. The stairway over the sea didn't need planting, it just needs to be noticed. 00:22:17.980 --> 00:22:23.180 And as I say this, like, the irony goes even a layer deeper because the city is named for a saint. 00:22:25.020 --> 00:22:31.020 San Antonio, like, like, Saint Anthony, he was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He was a Franciscan, 00:22:32.060 --> 00:22:36.300 in the Franciscan, like, Catholic order. Saint Anthony was famous in his own lifetime for 00:22:37.260 --> 00:22:41.660 like, his preaching, and for preaching where he stood on the side of the poor. 00:22:43.580 --> 00:22:50.860 And 800 years later, some of you grew up in the Catholic faith. You know what Saint Anthony's best 00:22:50.860 --> 00:23:00.620 known for? He's Saint people prayed to when something's lost. The finder of lost things. 00:23:03.340 --> 00:23:06.780 Two years ago, I stood in the cathedral in Lisbon, Saint Anthony was baptized. 00:23:08.620 --> 00:23:13.020 And some of you are here when I told this story, the little balcony next to this pipe organ where 00:23:13.020 --> 00:23:21.100 I stood and looked over this cathedral. And I felt the smallness in me in the best way possible. 00:23:23.260 --> 00:23:29.900 And it gave this whole church language of awe. I didn't know it then that Saint 00:23:29.900 --> 00:23:33.580 our city is named for came out of the very room where God got my attention. 00:23:36.780 --> 00:23:40.860 So, no, this is not a city that's waiting for the presence of God to show up. 00:23:42.300 --> 00:23:48.220 The city was actually found around missions. People were building churches on the river 300 00:23:48.220 --> 00:23:51.260 years, but anyone could post anything on Instagram about planting a church. 00:23:53.820 --> 00:23:58.300 The building that we take tourists to, and we tell them to remember it was a church. 00:24:00.460 --> 00:24:05.420 A city named for the finder of lost things does not need to be told that God has gone missing here. 00:24:05.420 --> 00:24:08.220 Nothing in San Antonio is lost, except some days maybe our attention. 00:24:10.940 --> 00:24:14.620 And attention is exactly the thing that we can practice. And that's what we're talking about today. 00:24:14.620 --> 00:24:19.740 Some of you have heard me do this before. In January I stood up here and I read the story of Moses 00:24:19.740 --> 00:24:24.380 at the burning bush. And there's a line in the scripture that we talked about where 00:24:24.380 --> 00:24:29.660 Eugene Peterson is a translation that says God saw that he had stopped to look. 00:24:30.460 --> 00:24:33.580 Moses was walking and said that God saw that he had stopped to look. 00:24:33.580 --> 00:24:37.020 The interesting thing, and I talked about this in January, is the bush was already burning. 00:24:38.220 --> 00:24:43.020 It didn't just ignite and catch Moses's attention. It was already on fire. 00:24:43.820 --> 00:24:50.300 Just Moses finally noticed it. Jacob's stairway was already standing there. 00:24:51.180 --> 00:24:55.260 It didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the same move all through scripture. 00:24:55.260 --> 00:25:02.460 What looks like God suddenly showing up is almost always somebody finally noticing that he's already there. 00:25:05.500 --> 00:25:10.780 In January I gave you this invitation to slow down, to stop, to look. 00:25:12.140 --> 00:25:18.460 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. 00:25:20.700 --> 00:25:27.820 Ideas that noticing is not a mood that happens to you. It's a skill. And its skills can be trained. 00:25:28.780 --> 00:25:33.740 And so it's something that I'm asking us to bend to, to practice. If you want to know what noticing 00:25:33.740 --> 00:25:40.540 looks like, look at Jesus. If you want to know what like a fully awake human looks like, watch 00:25:40.540 --> 00:25:47.660 what he notices. There's a story in in Mark chapter five. Jesus is moving through a crowd. 00:25:48.940 --> 00:25:54.380 It's massive crowd. Mark says a crowd isn't just around him. It's pressing him. It's crushing. 00:25:55.020 --> 00:26:00.860 Everybody wants proximity to Jesus. Dozens of people are in contact with him 00:26:00.860 --> 00:26:06.540 every minute as he's stepping through this crowd. In that crowd there's a woman who's been bleeding 00:26:06.540 --> 00:26:15.420 for 12 years. 12 years of doctors, 12 years of being left out. Under purity rules of the culture 00:26:15.420 --> 00:26:21.740 of the time, 12 years of being untouchable, unseeable. She has learned to move through the 00:26:21.740 --> 00:26:29.020 world without being noticed because being noticed has only ever cost her. I want to slow down for 00:26:29.020 --> 00:26:34.220 this just for a second. I don't think we can feel the weight of those 12 years where she sat where 00:26:34.220 --> 00:26:42.860 we are now. I know the men definitely can't in this room. 12 years of bleeding is a medical nightmare 00:26:42.860 --> 00:26:52.780 by itself. But there was a law sitting on top of that for this woman. In Leviticus 15, a one with 00:26:52.780 --> 00:27:00.460 an ongoing discharge is ritually unclean. Not for a week. Every single day that it continues she's 00:27:00.460 --> 00:27:07.580 unclean. An uncleanliness under that code was contagious. Her bed unclean, her chair unclean. 00:27:07.580 --> 00:27:14.540 Anyone who touched her or even touched what she touched unclean. Which means for 12 years this 00:27:14.540 --> 00:27:21.020 woman had been treated as a hazard by her community. No embrace, no shared table, no temple visits. 00:27:21.020 --> 00:27:26.140 She was cut off at the very place she would go to beg God for healing. If she'd been married, 00:27:26.140 --> 00:27:33.900 this had actually ended that. Rachel held Evans a writer that I love that we've talked about here. 00:27:33.900 --> 00:27:37.660 Spent a year actually living the Bible's instructions for women and she wrote a book about it called 00:27:37.660 --> 00:27:44.620 A Year of Biblical Womanhood. She spent days when she was writing this book. She was doing the things 00:27:44.620 --> 00:27:49.180 and then she was thinking about it and it turned into this book. She spent the days of her cycle 00:27:49.180 --> 00:27:55.020 camped in a tent in her front yard just to feel some fraction of what these laws did to women's 00:27:55.020 --> 00:28:01.100 actual lighter in that time. She wouldn't go in the house because she was unclean. Her point was 00:28:01.100 --> 00:28:08.380 the one that I'm making. These weren't abstract rules for this woman. They decided who got touched, 00:28:08.380 --> 00:28:16.300 who didn't, who was welcome and who wasn't. And be honest, like even now in our enlightened age, 00:28:16.300 --> 00:28:24.140 right? We still whisper about this conversation. Somebody still like slides the box up their sleeve 00:28:24.140 --> 00:28:28.540 at HEB. It's contraband. If Mottie's like, "Hey, can you pick this up from me from the store?" I'm like, 00:28:28.540 --> 00:28:37.820 "Oh no. They're going to see me." Someone in this room right now is really uncomfortable that I'm 00:28:37.820 --> 00:28:57.420 even mentioning this in church for stage. Right, Robert? So take this like, this whisper that we 00:28:57.420 --> 00:29:02.460 live in where I, like, it's hard for me to even go down the aisle and grab tampons and have to walk 00:29:02.460 --> 00:29:08.300 up and check out with them, right? Take that whisper, put a legal code on top of it, stretch it across 00:29:08.300 --> 00:29:13.100 all of yours. That's who's in this crowd. That's how invisible, invisible was for this woman. 00:29:15.020 --> 00:29:23.180 What you, is what makes the touch bravest, quietest thing in the gospels because by law, 00:29:23.180 --> 00:29:32.780 uncleanholiness travels upward, touching him should make Jesus unclean. That's the risk. 00:29:33.980 --> 00:29:38.860 That's why she's hiding after she does it. And instead fronts in the entire history of this whole 00:29:38.860 --> 00:29:45.900 system, it goes the other way. Power goes out. Healing runs down the hem of his clothing. 00:29:47.020 --> 00:29:54.780 Jesus doesn't catch her impurity. She catches his wholeness. So she does the bravest, quietest 00:29:54.780 --> 00:29:59.740 thing in the gospels. She comes up behind him, hidden in the crushing crowd, and she touches his 00:29:59.740 --> 00:30:08.940 clothes. Not him. She touches him. The minimum possible contact she could have. 00:30:10.460 --> 00:30:15.900 Healing without actual encounter. Grace anonymously, and then she can slide back into the crowd. 00:30:17.180 --> 00:30:23.180 And it works. Mark says she immediately knows in her body that she's free. And then just 00:30:23.180 --> 00:30:28.940 stops the whole procession. And Mark records it this way. At once, Jesus realized that power had 00:30:28.940 --> 00:30:32.700 gone out from him. He turned around the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?" 00:30:35.020 --> 00:30:41.420 And it cycles. You see the people crowding against you, right? And yet you ask, "Who touched me?" 00:30:42.940 --> 00:30:46.780 You can kind of hear the sass, right? Everyone is touching you. What are you talking about 00:30:46.780 --> 00:30:54.140 Jesus? Just one of those teaching moments. Like, the disciples are telling you that 00:30:54.140 --> 00:30:58.860 this picture is impossible for him to even know what happened. There's hundreds of contacts, 00:30:58.860 --> 00:31:01.580 total knowledge. And Jesus notices the one touch. 00:31:04.540 --> 00:31:09.660 Everybody else touched him like a crowd touches a celebrity. Get close, get something gone, 00:31:09.660 --> 00:31:14.460 contact no encounter. And one woman touched him with 12 years of hope concentrated in one finger tip. 00:31:15.980 --> 00:31:26.860 And that he felt. That's the filter of a fully awake human being, tuned precisely to the person 00:31:26.860 --> 00:31:34.460 everyone else's filter deletes. And this is not a one-off. This is just how Jesus' attention works. 00:31:34.460 --> 00:31:40.780 If you look at the gospels everywhere you catch him, Nate stood up here weeks ago and he told us 00:31:40.780 --> 00:31:46.700 the story of Zacchaeus, a whole crowd. Jesus picks out the man hiding in a tree. 00:31:48.460 --> 00:31:54.620 Before Zacchaeus promises anything, this pattern holds throughout the gospels. Whoever the room 00:31:54.620 --> 00:32:02.060 has learned not to see, that's exactly where his eyes go. And what she does, because he could have, 00:32:02.060 --> 00:32:08.140 he could have let her go. She got what she came for. She had her healing, but he stops. He waits. 00:32:09.020 --> 00:32:16.700 And who touched me? She comes trembling out of the crowd. And Mark says, tells him the whole story, 00:32:17.980 --> 00:32:24.620 12 years of it. She's like, oh, you want to know? Like, here's what's going on. Out loud, 00:32:24.620 --> 00:32:31.420 in public, this hidden woman, she's unhidden, but she still feels safe. There's something about Jesus. 00:32:34.060 --> 00:32:39.260 You've heard this room's language all year. She comes abiding. And Jesus looks at a woman, 00:32:39.260 --> 00:32:45.100 the whole system has filed under unclean and it, right? As we talked about this with Martin 00:32:45.100 --> 00:32:52.620 Boober, a case, a category, something to discard or to file away. And he gives her a name no one 00:32:52.620 --> 00:33:02.060 has spoken over her in 12 years. He said to her, daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace 00:33:02.060 --> 00:33:11.420 and be freed from your suffering. Daughter. This is a word that takes a person from it 00:33:12.700 --> 00:33:20.460 to a vow to becoming something. It started with him noticing the healing through his hymn. 00:33:20.460 --> 00:33:24.860 The encounter came because he refused to let her synonymous. 00:33:27.740 --> 00:33:30.460 That's because attention is how it becomes a vow. 00:33:32.060 --> 00:33:40.300 Can we actually get better at this? Or are some people just born noticers? Like, 00:33:41.260 --> 00:33:44.780 the rest of us are doomed to just count basketball pass and we never see the gorilla. 00:33:47.660 --> 00:33:51.340 There's one piece of research I'll give you this week and I love it. You guys have heard this name, 00:33:51.340 --> 00:34:00.220 Dacker Keltner. He's the psychologist that studies awe. He ran us down what they called awe walks. 00:34:00.780 --> 00:34:08.220 I've talked about this before, 50 minutes outside once a week. The only difference between groups 00:34:09.420 --> 00:34:14.940 was that they were doing this study with was the instructions they gave. They told them to go on 00:34:14.940 --> 00:34:21.580 walks, 15 minutes go outside once a week. And the instruction was walk like it's the first time 00:34:21.580 --> 00:34:27.340 you've seen any of this. Look at the big things. Look at the small things. That's it, an attention 00:34:27.340 --> 00:34:33.260 instruction. Go for a walk, but I feel like you've never seen this before. Eight weeks later, 00:34:33.260 --> 00:34:40.540 the awe walk group wasn't just feeling more awe on the walks. awe began to show up in their ordinary 00:34:40.540 --> 00:34:47.180 days outside of those walks. Joy too. Even their photos changed. If you looked at photos, they were 00:34:47.180 --> 00:34:52.380 taking photos on their on these awe walks. The photos changed while they were doing it. Over the weeks, 00:34:53.020 --> 00:35:02.940 the awe walkers will call that their selfies had less self in them and more world. 00:35:05.100 --> 00:35:13.660 They were taking us with the world. It literally started making themselves smaller in their own 00:35:13.660 --> 00:35:20.860 pictures without being told to. Same neighborhood, same 15 minutes, same leg, same group. The only 00:35:20.860 --> 00:35:28.780 variable was trained attention and the world got bigger on schedule. That's because this emotion 00:35:28.780 --> 00:35:34.620 of awe, it isn't a lottery. It isn't reserved for the Grand Canyon or for people with certain 00:35:34.620 --> 00:35:41.740 temperance. It's a capacity and it responds to practice like a muscle responds to reps. 00:35:45.980 --> 00:35:54.300 It's a trainable skill. The philosophers, Simone Weil, who thought harder about 00:35:54.300 --> 00:35:59.420 attention than maybe anyone in the last century. She went even further in this idea of studying 00:35:59.420 --> 00:36:05.020 attention. She believed, and I'm paraphrasing her, that attention in its purest, most unmixed form 00:36:05.020 --> 00:36:14.220 simply is prayer. In a letter to a friend, a poet who'd been this friend was a poet who'd 00:36:14.220 --> 00:36:21.980 been paralyzed in the First World War. Simone Weil wrote this to him. Attention is the rarest 00:36:22.620 --> 00:36:31.260 and purest form of generosity. Think about the woman in the crowd. Think about what cost 12 00:36:31.260 --> 00:36:39.180 years of invisibility to be seen in that moment. And what it gave her. I think Weil's right, 00:36:39.180 --> 00:36:46.860 attention is generosity. Maybe the purest kind. I love how it's prayer. This is what prayer is. 00:36:48.060 --> 00:36:54.860 When you truly notice someone, you hand them the one thing everyone is starving for to just be seen. 00:37:01.740 --> 00:37:07.660 Master, I told you, you're already practicing things. You didn't just pick up mo your practices. 00:37:08.620 --> 00:37:14.380 You grab your phone. We talked about it. Your attention is pulled somewhere. The filter we've 00:37:14.380 --> 00:37:20.940 been talking about all morning, the thing why calls generosity, the thing that turns it into 00:37:20.940 --> 00:37:26.460 thou. The thing that woke Jacob up is the single most fought over resource on planet earth. 00:37:28.220 --> 00:37:33.020 There are rooms full of very smart people who are paid very, very well to decide what you notice 00:37:33.020 --> 00:37:42.620 next. Every scroll, every badge, every red dot, everything that you that pulls you into your phone. 00:37:43.420 --> 00:37:51.980 It's training. Hear me carefully. This is not a shame thing. Like we pull the phones out in my 00:37:51.980 --> 00:37:57.820 screen times probably longer than most of yours. It's okay. You're not weak. You're up against a 00:37:57.820 --> 00:38:04.220 system designed by people who understand the gorilla video better than anybody. It's aiming 00:38:04.220 --> 00:38:14.700 your filter purpose at outrage, at comparison, at needing more. The question isn't whether your 00:38:14.700 --> 00:38:21.820 attention is being trained. It is today, the question in this series, what are you practicing 00:38:21.820 --> 00:38:28.620 and did you pick it? The assignment for this week, the first real practice 00:38:29.260 --> 00:38:35.020 series, I'm going to give you one practice for us all to do. It's fun underneath, like I said, 00:38:35.020 --> 00:38:38.700 everything else that we'll talk about during this series. It's the one that Dacker Keltner 00:38:38.700 --> 00:38:47.900 simple on. One awak, 15 minutes aside, phone stays home or stays in your pocket completely. 00:38:48.620 --> 00:38:53.900 One time this week, not daily, not a morning routine like once between now and Sunday. 00:38:55.180 --> 00:38:59.340 And on that walk, there's one instruction, the same one from the student that Keltner did. 00:38:59.340 --> 00:39:04.460 Walk like it's the first time you've ever seen any of it. The light on the wall, 00:39:05.340 --> 00:39:11.020 the flower, the bird doing the weirding and the tree, the tiny hooks on the bird. 00:39:12.300 --> 00:39:15.180 You're not trying to make anything happen. You're practicing looking. 00:39:17.100 --> 00:39:22.300 It feels nothing happens on your walk. That's fine. Remember the rule. Nothing happened. 00:39:22.300 --> 00:39:27.740 There's no board. You took a walk. Like worst case, you got 15 minutes of fresh air. The data 00:39:27.740 --> 00:39:34.940 says even that is a gift. But what I suspect is somewhere in those 15 minutes, maybe not the first 00:39:34.940 --> 00:39:40.940 walk. Maybe it's the fourth week from now. You're going to catch it. Some completely ordinary patch 00:39:40.940 --> 00:39:47.580 of your completely ordinary neighborhood is going to go quietly luminous for you. And Jacob's sentence 00:39:47.580 --> 00:39:51.820 is going to climb out of your chest before you decide to say it. God was in this place and I was 00:39:51.820 --> 00:39:57.980 not aware of it. The stairway is already standing. The traffic already running. The bush has been 00:39:57.980 --> 00:40:04.060 burning the whole time. The world is already lit. You were made to be a conduit and a representation 00:40:04.060 --> 00:40:11.900 of love made to practice love. And love starts with noticing. And so the call for this week is to 00:40:11.900 --> 00:40:26.860 go notice. Is the awe of the Lord that leads us to wisdom. Let's go to the sweet. Go experience 00:40:26.860 --> 00:40:34.780 some awe. And when you notice, it will give you the opportunity to love. And that's how we talk 00:40:34.780 --> 00:40:39.740 every great. That's how we end it. Our song will go love well. It's who you're made to be. You 00:40:39.740 --> 00:40:46.800 can notice first. So go do that. Love you guys. We'll see you next week.