San Diego First United Methodist Church "In Real Life 'Worlds Beyond'" by Gre LaDue for Friday, 30 May 2014

San Diego First United Methodist Church "In Real Life 'Worlds Beyond'" by Gre LaDue for Friday, 30 May 2014
Robin on nestI am sitting in the living room of my father's house in a small suburb of Chicago. It is 5:30 AM and the sun is just coming up.  Unlike me, it is lazy and slow to arise.
The house, at the moment, is mercifully silent and I sit reading with coffee in hand. I am still and silent, trying to remind myself that God is in charge, no matter what I think.
This small town where I grew up 50 years ago has changed much, and then again not at all. It remains a small microcosm of the big city just 35 miles east of here. Yet this sleepy little town appears amazingly unaware of the teeming life that exists there, seemingly isolated unto itself. 
Just outside the front door, not three feet from where I sit writing this, a mother Robin tends a nest with three fledglings in it. I have been watching this nest since I arrived three days ago, when there were three eggs and whenever I approached too close mother bird flew away, then returned when I left. So, we have avoided using the front door all week so as not to disturb her nesting, to give new life a chance. Life starts out small and needs tending and nurturing to develop.
Now, all three eggs have hatched and when I approach, she sits and stares at me, but she does not leave. She stares at me because now LIFE has happened. Life is in that nest. Even when I leave, she scans for potential threats, yett also unaware of the larger world that exists all around her.
For her, at this moment, there is only the life beneath her in the three chicks that she has hatched. They represent the continuance of life. That is all there is right now -- living in survival mode, focused, threat vs. non-threat, black vs. white. I wonder how many of us chronically live in this reduced form of existence?  Always on the lookout for threat.
I look out the window and two driveways up the sun catches a filament of thread on a mailbox that is stretched to make the third leg of a triangular web on the mailbox support. A spider has done this work overnight. While the world slept, this guy was busy creating in that darkness. His micro-thin filament supports this other world, yet he is most likely unaware of the mother bird's world that exists just 20 feet away -- unless she finds the spider and feeds it to her birds! Then the two worlds would intersect.
I would have been unaware of the web, except that the light hit it just the right way -- and then I could see. What else am I not seeing? What else do I need light to reveal to me; or darkness for that matter.
These worlds coexist, for the most part, completely unaware of the other, but somehow marvelously connected. I shudder to think of what lives, works, and things are happening in that lush green lawn under that mailbox. What worlds exist there? What realities am I unaware of in that expanse of green? 
I'm then aware of the neat row of houses down the street. What life exists there? What goes on in those little boxes that is life-giving or diminishes existence -- theirs and mine? How is my life connected to all this in ways that I can not imagine?
Life goes on in all these places and yet we go about our lives blithely unaware of the life all around us.
It is like that with the world of Spirit. Beyond our sentient world exists a world that is always available and reaching toward us, always waiting for us to reach out to it. But we often ignore, or even more, deny that it is there at all.
It is times like this morning, when all is still, that I can become aware of life all around me.  Even the life of the Spirit.
Each Wednesday in Vespers, after reading passages of Scripture we say, "WORD OF GOD WORD OF LIFE." Words have life, too, because they can convey realities beyond knowing -- allowing us to learn to see with our hearts not our eyes.
Then I wonder about the life and world that lives inside of me. The life that IS me. The life that IS you.
Chief Seattle was right. We are all connected in the web of existence. What we do to one part reverberates through the whole. The me that exists inside my own skin is still another world. All life is connected, God created it that way. We can never let go of that reality. And if we choose to ignore it, we do so to our own peril.
What part of this life by God is yet waiting for me to "see?" What part of this life by God is waiting for you?(Greg LaDue)
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