A Concord Pastor Comments: Virtual Retreat: Day 6

Photo by CP

My retreat ends tomorrow morning (Saturday) and I'll be back in Belmont around noon time, so this is the last installment of your virtual retreat.

I hope these posts have been helpful for you - I know this week has been a gift and a grace in my life.
I didn't come to this retreat with any agenda, I had no pressing questions or problems I had hoped to answer or resolve. Rather, it's been a week of hanging out with Jesus and that has left me refreshed in mind and body and in my faith and prayer.

As I get older I find that my time on retreat is more and more in a continuum with what came before and what will come after - and my retreat director tells me this is a good thing in my spiritual life. Still, retreat continues to be a time of insight (usually very simple) and revelation (more often than not of the common sense kind). I found this past week to be a time that helped me see with greater depth and perception some realities that are always present in my life - but which I often miss or ignore or dismiss.

The graphic above is a good example. It's a photo of a shallow creek that runs along a portion of the road where I took my daily walk this past week. I usually pay it no attention but on Thursday that slight stream mirrored the beauty of the late afternoon skies and became a pool of shimmering gold with traces of cerulean blue. The time, the place, the pace, the context and the retreat perspective through which I was experiencing everything all rendered the ordinary quite extraordinary, the everyday nothing short of exquisite.

Retreat is like that. Time for prayer is like that. Living with eyes of faith is like that. The challenge is this: to continue to see through the Lord's eyes what my own vision so often misses or ignores. For those who have eyes to see, there are always small streams of gold running along the paths of our daily travels. We need to find the time, to survey the place where we are, to slow the pace and seek the grace to look at life around us with eyes of faith, desiring to find the Lord's beautiful and even glorious presence in the simplest of things we encounter every day.

Thank you for praying for me while I was away on retreat - you can be sure that I have been praying for you. Let's continue to pray for one another as our retreat ends and we make our way back to the ordinary where our extraordinary God never fails to walk by our side and delight us in pools of shimmering gold and cerulean blue...