Because I Can… the random thoughts of Marc Scott

When I am in my truck there is one thing that happens as often as the key gets turned in the ignition… the iPod gets turned on!  When I drive music, of all styles, is my companion.  I can’t look at it, or reach out to it in the passenger seat.  But it provides melodic conversation that engages me from point A to point B.

Today though, as I prepared for my journey to work, I made a conscious decision to keep the iPod off.  Instead, my companion would be the creation around me.  In the quiet confines of my truck, as I traveled down the country back roads I often take to work, I used not my ears, but my eyes for entertainment.

In the busyness of life, in the hurried pace of society, it’s so easy for us to lose sight of all that is around us.  Our eyes lock into televisions and computer screens.  Bluetooth headsets have become a fixture as commonplace as earrings.  We have things to do, people to meet, places to go.  It seems a never ending, frantic pace.  It’s all, more often than not, in an effort to fit into our days more than our available time will allow.  In the process of that though, we miss so much.  So much of what is right before us, longing for us to notice it.

As as looked out at the creation around me, trying to soak it all in before I walked inside the 4, outside windowless walls of a radio studio, several thoughts entered my mind.

I thought about the grass.  There is a sod farm on one of the roads I take.  A sprawling sea of the most beautiful green you’ve ever looked upon.  Wide open space, and one hundred percent nature.  Living in an apartment, I don’t have a lawn to lay down in.  I miss it.  I listen to the guys at work, and at the fire hall, complaining about cutting the grass.  It seems an unappreciated wonder.  It often takes stains on the knees of our pants to make us notice it.

Next, I looked up.  The big blue sky is as limitless as the possibilities of all we can do, hear, see, touch, smell, and experience in our lives.  My mind raced with wonder.  Where does it begin?  Where does it end?  Why do I spend so much time in my apartment, staring at a ceiling of white, when I could sit on my porch and be hypnotized by a sea of blue?  Often, it takes the sky breaking with lightning, and opening with torrential rain to get our attention and make us notice it.

With the window down and the breeze blowing in my face, I felt the warmth of the spring air wrap itself around me like a hug.  Each ripple of wind like a finger reaching out for me.  It grabbed at me like your grandma does when you haven’t seen her for a while.  Surrounded by it’s embrace, I thought about how it takes a season of bone chilling cold to make us notice it.

It felt great to shut off everything for a while.  No TV.  No Radio.  No laptop or Blackberry or microwave oven.  Technology, in that moment, was an after thought.  All that man has made was, of little significance.  For that time, brief as it was, I existed only in the quiet serenity of some of the best that God has to offer us.  And all it took, was me turning off the distractions of life to get me to notice it