God, down to the very second

There’s a folder in my desk stuffed with letters – some 40 years old or more. Despite the passage of time, the handwritten swirls of ink from friends and family continue to inject wit, understanding and love. Within these folded pages are the annals of people who make an impact in my life.

Photo by Marcy Earley

In these days of e-mails, status updates and tweets, we have lost the meaning of the letter. The impersonal world of the instantaneous leaves us longing for something deeper, something with relationship. Blogs are the closest thing we have to letters today.  Within them are unique perceptions, revelations of personalities and inspirational insights that we can read – and then reread, hopefully tucking them away in our hearts.

Around the High Calling Network last month were plenty of “keepers,” blog posts that keep on breathing. There are so many many writers who spoke to the sands of time trickling out of our fingers. Perhaps there’s the realization that summer was rushing headlong into fall, that vacation can’t last forever.

Few captured the essence of time as well as Jenny Rain did in The Ministry of the Moment.

“When I stretch back the sixty-second rhythms of my day and take a deep look, I am becoming aware that God has shown up in ordinary, yet miraculous ways,” she writes.

Jenny advocates embracing the moment, down to each second as it unfolds. “I am guilty of leaving my minutes behind.”

At first read, I thought about my own wasted moments – like the time I spent analyzing the ingredients in Allspice or sniffing dozens of cantaloupes at the grocery store, pretending like I know what’s the best smell.

But Jenny isn’t talking about wasted moments – she’s talking about finding meaning in the moments, especially the unplanned ones. She’s tired of “compressing them into hurried adverbs of usefulness instead of expanding them into majestic adjectives of praise.”

Read her post from Rainmakers and Stormchasers.Read the rest of the month’s best at High Calling Blogs. Say hi to Jenny here,  and feel free to comment here.