dailydatewithgod

From an early age, the adults around us pick up on our particular aptitudes.  They notice how we are drawn to particular activities or ideas.  They pay attention because as children we are endlessly fascinating (at least that is how children are described when they are behaving well) mostly because they find all new things fascinating.  Children find newness in places adults call familiar.  There is a seemingly never-ending curiosity about life. We tend to think that we have lost the sense of novelty entirely and it is only a faculty of childhood because so many things are familiar.  Our minds create structures around familiarity and away from entirely new because that can cause discomfort and requires energy.  It is where we get the notion that we are too old to learn or do something.  Yet within our hearts lies the faculty of newness.  Each breath we take is not the same as the last one.  Just ask anyone present in the room when someone farted.  One moment the breath you take in is free of outstanding odor and then next it is not.  The whole experience of breath is new and a part of our system wakes up because a decision has to be made.  Do we stay knowing in the next few breaths the odor will recede or do we get out?  I supposed it depends on the kind of fart or if it is our own.  My point (and I do hope you are laughing right now) is the faculty of seeing newness and approaching life with curiosity is not one we lose with age.  We may forget it is there or it may sound like a foreign idea for approaching life to our mind, but our hearts know it and practice it in the simplest of ways.  God invites us to make use of the faculty of seeing novelty and initiating a renewed fascination with life by using the lens of our hearts.  The faculty of sight in our hearts enables us to see past the labels and classifications we know and look at people and things from a different angle.  Even the simple pause presented through the breath, enables us to set aside a moment to ask, God, how do you see this right now?