A 2nd Note

I think my posts are too long - so I am trying to split them into more readable sections - let me know what you think...

Thursday after noticing handshakes, we noticed people. We looked around at each other and saw each other as people, full of joy and peace, full of pain and doubt and fear and hurt. We dared to step out of the life of America where we simply try to get to the next task and get it completed and into the real life of wonder where amazing people surround us everyday - each of us wonderful!!!

I told about a young man who entered my office just prior to our time together - he had just returned from Haiti. What he had seen there had devastated his heart. The heartbreak of the little children, hungry and hurting, will never allow him to return to normal again. He was so crushed that he struggled to even spend the money to come to my office across town and the $1 of gas that he was spending! That was money, he reasoned, that could have fed 2 or 3 of those kids, as he wept before me. There he sat, crushed, broken, by the pain of those kids and that country and his inability to feed them all, save them all, help them all...

You see, he noticed. He saw those kids as beautiful little creations, each with their own handshake. He noticed their brokenness and pain...and it crushed him.

The thing is, we are surrounded by a society of hungry children. Yes, there are those who are hungry and hurting right there in your town (and we should be helping them). But, even more than that, we are a society that has lost its meaning and joy - we strive for things that mostly have no meaning - we spend almost of our time trying to earn enough to pay off our credit card bills and to buy the next thing we want. We spend most of our hours and days trying to build up enough to have joy in a few moments - rather than having joy in the everyday. We are bankrupt and broken and lost and full of pain - this land is filled with people who need to hear about the life that opens before us when we dare to notice. They need someone to SEE them - to be crushed for their pain and love them - and then to know that there is HOPE. When we are noticers, we have the chance to give HOPE. We want to notice!

The problem is that noticing means that we must LOOK and then we must be willing to give up our agenda, our plan, our timing, what ever we had in mind for that moment, in order to notice them and care about them. We do this everytime we get together at More than more. We NOTICE.