Are we paying attention

I can be a forgetful person. It is true; ask anyone close to me. I look for my keys, wallet, or phone at least once a day. I forget where I put things. Most importantly, sometimes I forget something I promise to do or something that someone has told me. In fact, to prove it even further, before I was a children’s pastor, during my internship, my nickname was Charles for reasons we will not go into here. I forgot to relay a piece of important information to the staff and before you knew it, two weeks went by before I remembered in staff meeting. The funniest/worst part of the whole thing was that the person it involved was not even named Charles, but that’s how I remembered it.  That makes me wonder. Over the last six weeks or so, if we were paying attention, God has taught us several things about Himself or what He is doing in the world around us. For me, He has taught me to slow down and try to avoid focusing on so many different things at one time. See, when it comes to me being forgetful, most of the time it’s because I’m either in a hurry, trying to focus on multiple things, or a combination of the two. Forgetting is not intentional, but I can be intentional on learning to slow down. We live in a very fast paced world. As eager as we are for this season of life to be in our rearview mirror, especially with all the talk and phases of reopening, I’m concerned that we may be more like the person we find in the book of James than we care to admit.  James 1:19-27, specifically verse 22-23, we see the image of someone looking in the mirror, seeing themselves, but as soon as they look away, they forget what they looked like.  The only way that someone immediately forgets what they looked like after looking in the mirror is if they weren’t really paying attention while they were looking. If we have not been paying attention to the things that God has been trying to teach us over the last several weeks, there is no way we will remember them when the fast pace of life returns as there will be many more things demanding our attention.