Learning to See and Love Attentively

Releasing & Letting Go Series

Remembering the Lightness

I remember it vividly. I was about eight years old, standing on our street and looking toward Lafayette Park, about a quarter mile away. I loved that park. But on that day, something else was happening. I felt an unmistakable lightness.

It was the unburdened joy of being carefree in the truest sense. No fear. No pressure. No history to manage. Just being. Just awareness. That moment etched itself quietly into me and never fully left.

Years later, in conversation with my brother, I found myself returning to that memory. Not nostalgically, but with a surprising recognition. I told him it felt as though I had returned to a place I love deep within myself. Not through time travel, but through intentional release.

I have been letting go. Releasing. Unloading. And somewhere in the midst of that surrender, something unexpected surfaced. Joy.

Not the joy tied to accomplishment, affirmation, or arrival. But the joy that returns when the weight finally lifts. The joy of breathing freely because the pack of expectations, regrets, and illusions has been set down.

I realized I was arriving at a place where releasing things produces joy. Scripture calls it joy unspeakable. That phrase no longer feels distant or abstract to me. It feels lived.

This is what I am learning. This is why I am writing. And this is why the joy of letting go matters, not only for me, but for all of us who bear God’s image while living in a world that teaches us to hold on to everything.

Imagination and Faith

For many of us, imagination was treated with suspicion. We were taught, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly, that it was unreliable, prone to fantasy, or capable of leading us away from truth rather than toward it. Faith, we were told, was safer when it remained factual and restrained, anchored in what could be clearly stated and defended.

Yet Scripture never treats imagination as a liability. It treats it as part of how human beings were created to see.

Faith itself requires imagination, not as invention, but as perception. When Scripture speaks of faith as the substance of what is hoped for and the evidence of what is not yet seen, it is not asking us to pretend. It is inviting us into a way of seeing. A way of interpreting reality through God’s story rather than through fear, noise, or scarcity.

Faith is not a denial of reality. It is a deeper engagement with it.

Biblical imagination does not create reality. It receives it. It listens before it speaks. It yields rather than asserts. Under the leading of the Spirit, imagination becomes the means by which we notice what God is already doing and find language for what the soul is learning.

Imagination allows us to experience God’s nearness not as a concept, but as companionship woven into time. Without imagination, God can remain informational, known yet distant.

With imagination, Scripture begins to intersect with memory, and memory with longing, and longing with hope. Prayer becomes honest rather than performative.

Imagination also shapes how we interpret the days we are given. Two people may live the same day and walk away with entirely different meanings. One experiences only inconvenience or burden. The other senses formation, invitation, or alignment. The difference is not temperament. It is how reality is being read.

This is how imagination functions in the life of faith. It restores attention in a distracted age. It allows Scripture to inhabit life rather than sit beside it. It keeps faith human and grounded rather than abstract.

What the Spirit teaches us to see within ourselves is not meant to remain interior. It finds its truest expression when it becomes love practiced toward another person, slowly, attentively, and without announcement.

Learning to See and Love Attentively

I am learning that attentiveness does not happen accidentally. It happens through intention. That realization may sound simple, but it has become formative for me. It is working. And I am serious about it.

I have come to see attentiveness not as a personality trait or a spontaneous virtue, but as a practice that must be chosen. I want this to be a primary focus of my aging.

At one point, I asked myself a clarifying question. Who can I practice attentiveness with without ever announcing that I am practicing it? The answer came immediately. Liessa. My wife.

She is the best place for this practice, not because it is easy, but because it is not. We share most of life together. Not occasionally. Not ceremonially. But daily. In the ordinary rhythms where attentiveness either deepens or quietly erodes.

There is also a harder truth. It is more difficult to practice attentiveness where familiarity and long known imperfections exist. I already know her patterns. She already knows mine. Which means I can easily assume I am listening when I am actually anticipating. I can believe I am attentive when I am only nearby.

Attentiveness in love is not proven through grand gestures. It is revealed in whether we remain when nothing is being asked of us. In whether we listen without shaping the moment toward efficiency or resolution. In whether we resist the impulse to fill space simply because silence feels exposed.

I am discovering that learning to be attentive is not about becoming more impressive. It is about becoming more faithful to the life I am actually living, and to the people who are already there.

That is how seeing becomes love, and love becomes formation.