Alan Fadling: Notes from my Unhurried Journey

This morning (Monday), I will be driving with two friends up to St. Andrews Abbey in Valyermo, CA for a personal retreat. It will be a nice crisp day (compared to Orange county).

I recently browsed some quotations from Frank Laubach’s classic book, Letters by a Modern Mystic. I love how this one illustrates the connection between enjoying God and seeing the world around me through His eyes:

“One thing I have seen this week is that God loves beauty. Everything He makes is lovely. The clouds, the tumbling river, the waving lake, the soaring eagle, the slender blade of grass, the whispering of the wind, the fluttering butterfly, this graceful transparent nameless child of the lake which clings to my window for an hour and vanishes forever. Beautiful craft of God! And I know that He makes my thought-life beautiful when I am open all the day to Him. If I throw these mind-windows apart and say, ‘God, what shall we think of now?’ He answers always in some graceful, tender dream. And I know that God is love-hungry, for He is constantly pointing me to some dull, dead soul which he has never reached and wistfully urges me to help Him reach that stolid, tight-shut mind. Oh God, how I long to help You with these Moros. And with these Americans! And with these Filipinos! All day I see souls dead to God look sadly out of hungry eyes. I want them to know my discovery! That any minute can be paradise, that any place can be heaven! That any man can have God! That every man does have God the moment he speaks to God, or listen for Him!” (Laubach, Frank. Letters by a Modern Mystic. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H Revell Company, 1937, p. 28.)

How is God opening your eyes to the beauty around you? How might He be opening your eyes to the real needs around you that He wants to touch through you?