The Attentive Life | Leighton Ford

March 20, 2020 Heather West

Each of us is part of a Greater Story, and behind our stories is a Storyteller calling us home. The deepest longing I have is to come home to my own heart. I believe all our stories are of longing and of looking. That has become very clear to me as I reread the notes and journals

I have written in recent years. For many years “journey” was a call to go as I traveled the world in ministry. “Home” was an equally powerful inner voice calling me to stay, to be rooted. Now I realize that these were not only two ways I spent my time but also a response to two notes in my own song: the lure of the road and the call to home.

The call was to be “home on the road,” to bring my real self before the real God, to be changed into his true image, to become all that God has made me to be. It was and is a longing to belong, to have a home for God in my heart. This sense of longing runs like an underground river through the writings of many observers of the human condition.

Yet why do I so often hide from this longing? Spiritual inattentiveness, I believe, comes in large part from our fear of being known for who we really are. Often we keep ourselves busy and distracted because we fear that if we slow down and are still, we may look inside and find nothing there.

If the first part of my own journey involved longing, the second has encompassed mainly looking —coming to terms with important parts of my soul, bringing my real self before the real God, and discovering prayer.

Attentiveness is not simply a path to self-fulfillment but as the very essence of our journey to the Center— as the way home to our own heart, the way of making our heart a home for God. I long to identify waymarks for my own second journey but also for others who are walking the path with Christ, or searching for the path to Christ, so we may walk it together.

I have noticed in my own experience how the vocational journey and the personal journey intertwine. What God is doing in both is similar, very much like the interweaving of the intricate strands in a Celtic cord, a work of art designed to show how God is at work weaving the inner and outer parts of our lives into a unified pattern.

I have sensed a strong call to be an artist of the soul and a friend on the journey, especially to younger men and women, and others, who seek to be led by Jesus, to lead like him and to lead to him, and who have a hunger to be whole people shaped by inner compulsions, or captive to outer expectations, but drawn by the inner voice of love. To listen to this voice, we need to pay careful attention to where our inner and outer selves disconnect and where they need to come together in a beautiful pattern that reflects Jesus, whose inner life with his Father and outer life of ministering to others were very much one.

To walk this path home, and to be a companion to others on the journey, I need to learn both to be still and to go (or grow) deeper. I do not feel old yet! But I do realize that this life stage requires not so much doing for God as paying attention to what God is doing.

There are periods in which we are mostly active and outwardly focused. And there are times in which we become more reflective, when we move more from action to being acted upon. The latter time may well come as we get older. We are learning how we may become more attuned to the still, small voice of God in all the seasons of our lives.

WHAT WILL WE PAY ATTENTION TO?

Finding new practices to pay attention to God throughout the day has not meant in the slightest jettisoning of either the foundational beliefs or the spiritual disciplines that I have followed since my youth. It has meant exploring other ways: silence, stillness, art and poetry, reading Scripture not by going through great chunks but by meditating on smaller portions, listening carefully to God and my own heart, having a trusted spiritual companion as a friend on the journey.

There is one more thing to say: Paying attention is not a way by which we make something happen but a way to see what is already given to us. I need very much to learn to pay attention. But it is not my perfect attention that brings grace. Grace opens my eyes as I wait so that I may see both Giver and gift, and be grateful.

Dr. Leighton Ford is President of Leighton Ford Ministries which focuses on raising up younger leaders to spread the message of Christ worldwide. He has spoken face to face to millions of people in 37 countries on every continent of the world and served from 1955 until 1985 as Associate Evangelist and later Vice President of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Leighton lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, Jean. Their children are a married daughter, Debbie, Kevin who partners with him in LFM, and their older son, Sandy, who died after heart surgery in November 1981.