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Attention is the Beginning of Devotion

Mary Oliver wants us to notice

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

— Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), 8.

Ryan is a nobody who belongs — body and soul, in life and in death — to his faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He served as a lead pastor at a church in Southern California for 8+ years. Before that, he worked as a software engineer for a decade. Today, he lives with his family in Escondido, California.

The Weary Pilgrim

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