Your attention is a valuable contribution wherever you can spend it. Even in settings where our usefulness is in question, where we feel like the dummy in the room and doubt our right even to be present, we can still pay close attention-and that’s not nothing.

it’s called “paying” attention for a reason. Because it’s costs you one of the most valuable things you have to give. The attention you pay to people and projects infuses them with intention, and, what’s more, we all know the indignity of not being paid attention to. We can choose to dignify ourselves and our encounters with our focused attention.

Of course, that means making a determination about things that aren’t worth our attention. This post is being composed on an airplane with seat-back screens flashing all around. You’re more worth my attention than them.

One of the benefits of doing consistent work and sharing it with the world is that people will use it, even if you think they won’t.

This sermon is a dud. This blog post is empty. That newsletter article won’t be read. But who knows? If we put it out there, people can do with it what they want: tape it to their desk; send it to their brother. But only if we make it.

The same is true of churches. There is so much wrong with so much of what we have a thought to do. But our calling and God’s grace compel us to do the work anyway and let our communities put it to use.

It’s not ultimately our work.

I serve on a presbytery committee that is looking for ways to share work and resources with other nearby presbyteries and finding it very difficult to get anything going (for the uninitiated, a presbytery is a regional grouping of Presbyterian congregations).

It’s not going to work. It shouldn’t work.

It would be different if there were a person, if there was a group of people, that wanted to work in something together. That’s how real partnership works: between motivated people.

But the pursuit of partnership as a practical idea, say for the purpose of consolidating diminishing resources and cutting costs, won’t work. And that’s good, because when it does work it’s imposed on people who don’t really want it and can’t really own it.

What work do we want to do, and who do we want for our partners?

“Daddy I just saw a lizard!” said my daughter the other day from her perch on the living room couch.

“A lizard?” I asked. We live in Southern California, and there are little lizards all over the place. But we’ve never had one in our house before. Yet she insisted she saw one and that it had crawled beneath the cabinet. That cabinet is bolted to the wall. I made a mental note and left it alone.

Then yesterday morning, preparing to leave for the day, I saw the lizard at the base of the staircase, just as she’d described. I made a move toward it, and it scurried underneath the couch. There was no time to pursue it. We left it to the mercy of the cats, and I spent the morning Googling “lizard infestation” and asking peoples’ advice. I’m reasonably certain that it came in through our fireplace and that it’s not alone. My wife calmly projected, “There’s probably a nest in there.” A nest of lizards in my house. Awesome.

Yet the advice I’m getting is to leave the lizards be. They’re harmless. They’re actually helpful, as they will consume lots and lots of bugs. Two cats are something of an insurance policy against the population getting out of control, so leave the lizards alone.

GRATUITOUS METAPHOR WARNING

What are the lizards in our lives and communities? What happenings or people scurry into our routines to unsettle us and spook us and maybe even cause our hair to stand on end but that are actually harmless? Are we battling creatures that will actually promote health and balance if we can only get comfortable with their presence in our otherwise orderly house? What looks like an infestation but might actually be pest control?

What are are lizards? And do we have cats?

“[God] saw the misery of Israel in Egypt, and that led to his determination to save them. He saw Moses approach the burning bush, and he saw the blood on the doorposts on the Passover night. Seeing is part of the gracious, saving acts of God . . . Seeing already involves a decision. The decision corresponds to justice.” (Donald Gowan,”Theology in Exodus”)

“Happy are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times.” (Psalm 106)

If we would be just, as God is just, then we cannot separate what we’ve seen from what we do. The act of seeing must also be the act of deciding–deciding to intervene, deciding to give, deciding to stop. That terrible tension we experience when we’ve seen something wrong that somebody other than us should fix must be overcome, so that we are the ones who fix, because we are the ones who see.

Of course, pretending we don’t see is a failing all its own.

With God, “Seeing already involves a decision.”

May it be so with us.