Paying Attention
Linda Soller | Mar 18, 2013
From the time you were a little kid somebody has been telling you to look both ways before crossing the road, watch your step on the steps, turn on the lights so you can see where you are heading, don’t stick your finger in the light socket and other life rules. Most of the rules come down to paying attention to what you’re doing and your surroundings. As we get older we may not feel the need to pay such close attention because we’ve master the safety part. We are smart enough to know we don’t want to get hit by a car or fall down a flight of steps carrying our laundry basket, well you get the picture, or do you?
We fall in to our patterns and hardly notice what’s going on around us. Think of all we are missing. I had the flu in late February and it was all I could do to sit up. I hardly remember several days of that week and when I started to recover it was surprising how much effort it took for me to do the smallest routine things. It was a real wakeup call because I go through the majority of my days on auto drive.
Our book group, The Lunch Bunch, just finished with When God Winks at You by Squire Rusnell. It’s a charming book full of stories of situations that some call coincidences but Mr. Rusnell calls “godwinks”. A good example is when he talks about how hard it was to get his book published then noticed. He wanted badly to be on Oprah, the holy grail for authors, but it wasn’t going to happen. Then in an interview Oprah pointed out that the book by her bed which she was reading was When God Winks at You and the rest is history as they say. Mr. Rusnell had been in prayer asking for help to get his book out there on a bigger scale. When the regular Oprah interview wasn’t in the cards he thought the game was done, but apparently God knew different. These “godwinks” are ways God lets us know he is watching, he is listening, and he hasn’t up and left. There are multiple touching stories of people who have lost family members and find such comfort in those “winks” from God.
The book encourages us to try and pay attention and to try and recall the “godwinks” in our lives, those coincidences that change everything or speak directly to our greatest needs. Most of us are too busy to make the connections and we let the moments slip. I am guilty of both.
My father was a real puzzle guy. He had to do his puzzle everyday and if possible wanted to be the first to get it done, or better yet the only one who could get it finished. My mom and my brother are fans of the activity too. For some reason my sister and I just never really got in to the puzzle scene. Recently my sister decided she would sit down and really make an effort to complete the puzzle. She got to a question about one who teaches exercise, or something similar, and the answer was PETEACHER. Big deal you might say, well, our dad was a P.E. Teacher. My sister immediately put it on her Facebook page and her good friend responded with, “that is what we call a godwink”. It appears Mr. Rusnell’s book is getting the attention he wanted and in return it is making us pay better attention to the world around us. God is watching and every now and then you may just get a wink and a smile.
Have a great week :o) Linda
