When you are yearning to have a relationship with God, your sacred work is to still long enough to pay attention and locate your soul — so you can know where you are in relation to God. The holy work of being human is to keep paying attention to the location of our own souls: location, location, location. And then attention, attention, attention — to what is happening within our own souls.
What we pay attention to is how we spend our lives. Pay attention mostly to the news — and we can end up spending our one life on headlines. Pay attention mostly to screens — and we can spend most of our days in a digital haze. Pay attention mostly to the negative — and we spend the only life we have on the very things that we wish weren’t.
As it turns out — we gain more of whatever we pay attention to.
Pay attention to love — and you are given more love. Pay attention to the good and the beautiful — and you spend your soul on what is good and beautiful. Pay attention to sunrises and laughter; pay attention to smiles and patches of light on the floor; pay attention to God in the everyday moments. So the question is: What do you really want more of?
Attend to God — this is the best way to tend to your own soul.
If you stilled your soul right now, could you attend to the voice of God speaking directly to you?
If you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. — Proverbs 2:1–5 ESV
Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. — Hebrews 2:1 ESV
Without daily attentiveness to the way of Jesus Himself, to the questions of Jesus — it’s our default to drift away. Therapist Curt Thompson asks in The Soul of Shame: Isn’t God asking questions of us all the time?1 God’s voice still reverberates across time and wakes our souls.
- “Where are you?” God called in the garden, the One always looking for the way to us (Genesis 3:9).
- “Who do you say I am?” Jesus questioned Peter (Luke 9:20).
- “What do you want?” Jesus asked His disciples (John 1:38).
- “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” the angel of the Lord asked a fleeing Hagar (Genesis 16:8).
Maybe if we begin to attend to, to answer, God’s questions, we’d be less likely to question God’s ways.
Right now, that your soul might not drift away, attend to who your soul says God is. That is what God is asking you right in this moment:
Who do you say I am? — Matthew 16:15
The answer to this question matters — perhaps more than any other question. “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,” writes A. W. Tozer.2 Whoever you say He is determines the way your life will go. Say He is failing at being a good God — and your life ultimately fails to go a good way. Say He is a kind God — and your soul flourishes in the kinds of ways you always hoped.
Pay attention to the kindness of God — and you find the way to the kind of life you always dreamed of.
It is paramount that you pay attention to who you say God is — because who you say God is determines if you will spend your life in deep joy or deep in a wilderness of bewilderment. Attentiveness to the kindness of who God is leads to the remembrance of all His loving-kindness, and in turn, this attentiveness acts as a compass in your soul, turning you toward all kinds of moments of grace on the way. Pay attention, soul.
- Who do you say God is?
- How will you still your soul and allow God to attend to you?
Everything else can follow after — everything can be attended to after we give attention to the One who so tenderly attends to us, so lovingly attaches Himself to us. He is not a distant God, but a God who pulls you in so close that the calming and regulating rhythm of His heartbeat calms yours. His attention is not divided, not pulled into many directions like ours. His attention is fixed fully on you.
The only way a heart can ever be unafraid and untroubled is for it to be undivided. How can we beg God to divide seas for us if our own attention is divided? Why expect God to split waters for us if we are just giving Him our split attention? The only way our waves can be divided is to give God our undivided attention.
Do you hear it right now, in the stillness of your soul as you pause: the Lord calling after you, asking you to attend to where your heart really is, where your soul really is, like He called after Hagar? “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” (Genesis 16:8).
Unless we make paying attention to where our souls are our everyday way of life, how can we really know where we are going or coming from — and how will we see the way through? Attend to where your soul is.
God is here in this sacred place right now, waiting to hear your whole honest heart in prayer.
- Where are you? Where are you in relation to Him?
- Where have you been of late?
- Where in your life are you coming from a place of worry and fear?
- Where are you coming from, in your mind, in your day, in your soul, when you’re paying attention to what seems to be going wrong, all that seems to be in the way? In what ways could you pay attention to grace?
Jesus, in His own desperate hour, in His Gethsemane, turned His eyes from the horrors of where He’d come from and looked to where He was going and “lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that the Son may glorify You’” (John 17:1 ESV).
In this holy and hurting moment, in the middle of the world’s mourning, in the middle of our own chaos, in all our own hurting ways, from wherever we are coming — right now, we lift our eyes up to where we are going, and we pray: Father — the hour has come. The hour when I need You to come through, to show me where I am going, how to live the way, to turn my eyes to rest in Yours, my only way — help me glorify You.
Your life goes where you keep looking. Looking around at everything and everyone else can cause all kinds of heartache. Looking up heals all kinds of heartache.
And the old hymn resonates in our aching, praying hearts:
“Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”
- What are you, and your soul, attending to today?
- Where is your gaze directed and drawn to?
- What holds your heart’s attention today? How does your day keep turning to face God — or how and where does it turn in another direction?
- How could you look long on Jesus today? Because whatever we look at is what we become.
- How could you gaze on the cross of love today? Because whatever we look at is what we become.
- How could you keep looking for the goodness and the beauty and the loveliness and the mercy and all these gifts of grace? Because whatever we look at is what we become.
- Where are you paying attention to the kindness of God in your life?
- Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves (Downers Grove II, IVP Books, 2015), 124.
- W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God, Their Meaning in the Christian Life. (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2022).
Excerpted with permission from Sacred Prayer by Ann Voskamp, copyright Ann Voskamp.
* * *
Your Turn
What are you paying attention to these days? What do you want more of? God is here. Turn your eyes to Him! ~ Devotionals Daily
