Inattentional Blindness — Or Attentional Awareness?

One day, I realized I had arrived at my house without remembering a single thing along the route. I didn't remember the blinky light near my house, or if the bushes up the street were still flowering, or even if there were other interesting cars on the roadway. I had simply arrived home, on autopilot. I was, like so many of us often do, operating purely on habit and entirely in my own head.

Running through my to-do list and planning what we were going to cook for dinner consumed me all the way from the church to my house. I was experiencing what psychologists call inattentional blindness—so focused on myself that I missed what was going on around me.

How many times has that happened to you? We all experience inattentional blindness, it's why so many car accidents happen close to home. You go through your routine in the morning, and it's so routine that you forget if you actually took your medicine or if that was just a habit rewriting the memory. Or you start driving to a familiar place and arrive, forgetting what happened along the way.

This inattentional blindness happens too in our spiritual lives. We come to worship and over time it becomes a habit, seeing familiar faces and uttering familiar words. We can go days or even weeks without any sense of God in our midst. And somedays, we go through the whole routine, blind to the ways the Holy Spirit moves on a Sunday and throughout our lives. But I think the kind of faith I'd like to have is more of the opposite, an attentional awareness.

Last night, we kicked off our first Dawnings event at Highland Hills where we focused on My Story—telling the stories of how God has been active in our lives. We spent time telling the important stories of our lives in order to see the common thread of God's presence. In partners we got to practice telling our stories, as a way to give voice to the things God has done in our lives. By telling our stories we practiced remembering well. Attentional awareness is built on remembering well our lives. This is how we start to build awareness of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Because if we can drive home and not even notice if the flowers are in bloom or the cars around us, things that are very tangible and visible, how will we notice the work of the Holy Spirit? How will we notice the mystery and intangible presence of God?

My prayer for our church and myself these days is this: Lord, help us to be a people who are open to the ways you are moving. Help us to be a people who remember your good works in the past, and can build upon that for the future.

For that and so much more, thanks be to God!