My goal over the summer break is to walk 4 miles every day.  In reality, that amounts to about 4 or 5 times a week.  I know myself. I’m not the best at actually achieving the goals I set, so I set them high and fall short.   In the end, I walk more often than if I had set a more realistic goal to walk  5 times a week.  Because then I would probably only be walking 2 or 3 times a week.

Anyways, today on my walk, I saw ANOTHER really large turtle along the path.   Crazy, but in one week I have now seen more enormous turtles in the “wilds” than I have ever seen before in my entire life. OK, you’ve got my attention.

If turtles remind me of how at times we are to stick our necks out there for the right reasons, I’m thinking that perhaps something, someone is trying to speak to me.

Burning Bush

There’s a story in scripture of Moses, a man just minding his own business and doing what he did every day, which was watching sheep when out of nowhere he encounters a bush that is burning.

Those of us familiar with this story may have stopped thinking about how absolutely astounding that is.

Moses thinks to himself that this is quite amazing.  He stops what he’s doing, and walks over to look at the bush. Exodus 3: 4 says it like this:  

When the Lord saw that he had caught Moses’ attention, God called to him from the burning bush.

What do you do when something catches your attention?  You stop what you are doing, and pay attention.

Hey.  Pay Attention

Messages come at us every day, fast and furiously, through e-mails, tweets, Facebook, blog feeds, text messages, and on and on. Most of these no longer really capture our attention.  They mostly have become part of the noise that we live with.  Something needs to be pretty unusual or unique to capture our attention any more.

But these turtles now have my attention.  I’m asking if there is something that I’m supposed to be seeing, or hearing, or understanding?  Something that I’m to do that means sticking my neck out there?  It could all have been coincidence and not amount to much of anything, but I at least want to be open and asking the questions just in case there is something that I am to see through this.

In the story of Moses, God gets Moses’ attention and then invites Moses to be a part of God’s epic story to rescue his people, a story which continues to this day.  All I know is that if there is the possibility of taking another step towards engaging God’s story, I don’t want to miss it because I wasn’t paying attention.

I believe God loves us and cares about us enough to not just let us live our mundane lives, but to catch our attention if he must in order to invite us to be a part of his story, the greatest Love Story of all times.

How about you?  Is there something that is catching your attention these days?  Maybe the same topic keeps coming up in various settings, or different people keep mentioning a similar theme to you that you’ve been thinking about, or you keep noticing the same problem in the world around you everywhere?  These are things to pay attention to.  Ask yourself the question of what you maybe are to see or hear through these.  It just may be that these are gifts to you to help you see past the mundane, usual tasks of life, to call you to something so much more.