On Tuesdays, I drop my high schooler at Starbucks for an early morning Bible study. Forty-five minutes later, I pick her up. It’s one of those little windows of waiting we all get to choose how to fill. 

Tuesday was the first cool day after a blazing hot summer, so I decided to park the car, roll down the windows, and do nothing but look around and notice things with God.

Noticing things with God is one of my favorite ways to pray. It involves simply letting my gaze be drawn any which way and letting God direct my attention. Sometimes I articulate what I’m noticing, but synthesis, especially in the form of words, takes a back seat to observing. 

As I sat outside the Starbucks, the sounds of my city felt cozy and familiar. I glimpsed the trash truck driver behind his foggy windshield, and it struck me that God was with him on his trash route just as God was with me on this lovely morning. 

I watched a young woman with coffee get into her car, take a styrofoam cup out of her cupholder, look around, and set it on the pavement. She thought no one saw her. 

The trees circling the lot were tinged with crimson. A leaf floated down, and I realized the ground was already covered with leaves, but I hadn’t noticed until that moment. Even without the prevenient grace of a pumpkin spice latte, I exulted in my first taste of Fall! 

These might not seem like especially meaningful observations, but when I spend 45 minutes in this unstructured — you might even say unfocused — way, it shifts my whole outlook. ​“I return to my senses,” in the words of Annie Dillard, who passed away last month. And my senses return me to God.

Earlier I said that when I pray this way I let my gaze ​“be drawn any which way,” but that is not really true. There are many attention-grabbers I choose to ignore. The ad above the ATM, the phone in my purse, the book in the back seat. 

That all can wait. And today I have the luxury of losing track of time because I know my daughter and her friends will emerge in a cloud of coffee-scented teenage laughter when it is time to go.

My job is to keep my attention free so that I can give it to God. Both mindless diversions and squeeze-every-minute productivity hacks can hold my senses hostage. Optimization gurus and apps abound with strategies for paying attention, but techniques for productivity often work against the goal of presence. 

To see the bush on fire, Moses had to ​“turn aside.” God gives the eye-catching invitation. Moses has a choice — to see, or not to see. 

We all have this choice. Choosing to see means getting outside of our hermetically sealed environments and being ​“off the clock” more often… In fact, it means deciding to live off the clock, in the sense that our own agendas and schedules are held with open hands. That doesn’t mean we never stay at a task, but it does mean we hold every single task before the face of God, equally ready to set it aside or see it through to completion, no matter what the cost. It means being ready to lavishly spend our time and attention without fear or stinginess. 

Of course we will not always succeed at this, and that’s ok. Frank Laubach, a wonderful pioneer in how to grow attentiveness to God, wrote candidly of his own failures, but testified that progress is possible. He writes again and again of the determination required for a life of spiritual seeing. But he differentiates between determination and strain. ​“Strain does not seem to do good,” he writes. ​“I feel something ​‘let go’ inside, and lo, God is here! It is a heart melting ​‘here-ness,’ a lovely whispering of father to child, and the reason I did not have it before was because I failed to let go.”