See what you Seek

In the last issue of Stanford magazine, there was a really interesting article about a new book by anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann called "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God."

In the book Luhrmann doesn't talk about whether or not God exists. She talks about how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God's voice. There's also brief mention in the article of students in a study where they were told to visualize the deceased Leland Stanford Jr. (and some of them did).

This article really emphasized for me the fact that we do see what we seek to find. If I'm not looking for the divine, then running into a neighbor for an intense conversation, or the fact that our real estate agent answered the phone after not speaking for seven years would be just plain luck. But if I am seeking the divine, then I might notice things I wouldn't, or make connections that I will attribute to divine intervention.

I think the opposite is also true: if I believe that most people on the road today are terrible drivers, I will find a lot of bad drivers out there.

I really like the work of Christine Carter, who has a blog and a book called Raising Happiness. She talks a lot about the science of happiness, and about how incorporating different habits have been statistically shown to make us feel happier - having a faith practice is one of them. Her discussions about gratitude have really hit home for me - the more you focus on things you are grateful for, in a routine way preferably every day, the more grateful (and happy) you will feel for your life.

Yesterday I went to Big Trees State Park with the boys, and I saw the most "ginormous!" tree I have seen in my life. These sequoias tower over the redwoods hands down. And for me, I saw amazing grace, evidence of a God that is both large and small, and ancient.

And I will continue to seek.