Probably every one of us has looked up from the clutter of our days and realized, with a quiet ache, that we are spending the currency of our souls on the wrong things. We yearn for the expansive spaces—traveling to distant horizons, hiking the rugged cathedrals of the mountains, or losing ourselves in the quiet, meditative tinkering of a garage.
Yet, we allow the transcendent to be crowded out. The daily demands, the relentless swarm of what I call the “mosquitoes in the room,” dominate our hours, our weeks, and ultimately, our lives. We find ourselves caught in a profound existential irony: we are perpetually reactive, tending to the loudest or most irritating demands rather than the most sacred or joyful. We mistake urgency for importance, and in doing so, we let the noise of the world drown out the music of living.
There is a vast market of books and motivational theories offering to fix our fractured attention, but who has the luxury of time to seek external remedies for an internal ailment?
I don’t pretend to hold the master key to this human dilemma. But I do know this: we must cultivate an inner stillness, a state of spiritual alertness. We must listen for that quiet nudge—that “pig’s whisper”—that subtle, divine clue from God that cuts through the static. It is a whisper that gently corrects us, saying, “Hubbell, you do have time for this one.” Or, as my old coach would put it with a more grounded urgency: “Make time!”
These holy interruptions rarely come when we are at leisure. They find us precisely when we are most entangled in the busywork of existence—tending to things that don’t actually matter in the moment, and perhaps don’t matter for eternity. The grace lies in catching ourselves, breaking the spell of the mundane, and choosing the better portion.
Leave a Reply +