Daily PresenceSample

In both Psalms 117 and 118, the Psalmist confesses the greatness and the enduring nature of God’s love. In reflecting on those verses, I wondered how David may have revised the Psalms had he lived on this side of Calvary. Certainly, he would have written about Jesus’s incomparable and enduring love. In the midst of that wondering, an experience from years ago rose to my memory. Here’s what happened.

For most of the last 18 years before I retired from my full-time career, I lived close enough to campus to commute by bicycle on fair-weather days. So one October noonday as I rode home for lunch, about two blocks from campus along my route, I was passing a neighborhood church just as the bell tower began chiming out the noon-time medley. I found myself captivated by the charming melody of the bells proclaiming, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

I wish I could explain exactly how the sound of those chimes arrested me, literally! Just moments before, my battered brain was stewing in the morass of some workplace complication I should have left at the office when I rode off a few moments earlier. But by the second or third chiming note, the chains loosened in my mind as I pulled into the church driveway and literally stopped in my tracks to consume this melody and the moment.

“Awesome!!!! Sooooooo gorgeous!” Of course, I joined in singing (to myself) the precious words to the first song I learned in childhood.

In that incident, I experienced what I describe as anunintentional devotional moment, the spontaneous, unexpected kind that can be more intense and meaningful than a planned devotion, because intentional devotions are often programmed into routines. (And, mind you,rutandroutinecome from the same Latin root!).

In no way, of course, does this piece suggest that we quit all planned devotions and sit around waiting for spontaneous epiphanies to burst upon our senses. Heaven forbid! We would certainly be disappointed. But at the same time, may we never miss anunintentionaldevotional moment as we ask for God to give us discerning hearts and keen senses. May we be ever sensitive to those unexpected, divine appointments that he plots at random times and in diverse places along our way.