There is a question I have been carrying for some time.
What is the opposite of love?
For years, I would have answered without hesitation.
Hatred.
It seems obvious enough.
Hatred certainly stands against love.
But the longer I sit with the life of Jesus, the more I wonder whether something subtler often comes first.
Inattention.
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Jesus seemed to notice what everyone else overlooked.
A widow placing two small coins into the treasury.
A blind man no one wanted to hear.
Children the disciples tried to send away.
A woman hidden beneath years of shame.
Zacchaeus sitting up high in a tree.
A thief hanging beside Him.
He moved through crowds,
yet somehow always saw the person everyone else had missed.
Love notices.
Everything else grows from there.
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Perhaps attention is one of love’s first movements.
Not hurried attention.
Not distracted attention.
Not attention scattered among a thousand competing voices.
The quiet, undivided attention that knows how to rest.
For we become like the One we behold.
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This may be why the story of Mary and Martha has begun opening differently for me.
Jesus never tells Martha that serving is unimportant.
Nor does He criticize hospitality.
Instead, He gently names what has happened within her.
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things.”
Many things.
Good things.
Necessary things.
Yet her attention had become divided among them.
Pulled in every direction at once.
Then Jesus says something remarkable.
“One thing is necessary.”
Mary had chosen it.
She allowed her full attention to come to rest in Him.
The one thing Martha needed was not fewer responsibilities.
It was a heart gathered around Christ before returning to the many things.
Because once our attention is gathered around Him,
everything else begins to find its proper place.
Yet even this does not begin with us.
Before attention ever becomes our gift to another,
it is first God’s gift to us.
Long before our gaze rested upon Him,
His loving gaze had already rested upon us.
Before we learned to love Him,
He first loved us.
Before we ever called His name,
He had already called ours.
Every act of redeemed attention begins by discovering that we have been lovingly attended to all along.
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Love begins with attention.
But it does not end there.
What we behold slowly shapes the way we behold others.
Jesus never tells us to manufacture His kind of love.
He invites us to remain.
To abide.
To keep our eyes upon Him.
Then something beautiful begins to happen.
Almost without our noticing,
His way of seeing becomes our own.
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We begin noticing what He notices.
The lonely person standing quietly at the edge of the room.
The child asking one more question.
The weary cashier whose smile never reaches her eyes.
The friend who says, “I’m fine,”
while hoping someone will hear the ache beneath the words.
The beauty hidden inside ordinary mornings.
Cedar waxwings tenderly passing a berry back and forth.
A flower climbing an old stone wall.
Our sight is slowly being reshaped by love.
People no longer appear merely as interruptions.
They become persons entrusted to our attention.
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Paul writes that as we behold the glory of the Lord,
we are being transformed into the same image.
Perhaps transformation happens more gently than we imagine.
The longer our attention rests upon Christ,
the more His way of loving becomes our way of moving through the world.
We become like the One we behold.
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I wonder whether this is part of what happened to the church in Ephesus.
They had guarded truth carefully.
They had tested false teachers.
They had endured faithfully.
Yet somewhere along the way,
they had left their first love.
Perhaps their devotion had become separated from the One who first awakened it.
They still possessed many right things,
but had lost their center.
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Perhaps this is what the Spirit is lovingly redeeming.
Not only our thoughts.
Not only our habits.
Our attention.
Gathering what has been scattered.
Teaching us to rest beneath the gaze of Christ.
And as we behold Him,
His love begins reshaping the way we see.
The overlooked become visible.
The hurried become interruptible.
The forgotten become remembered.
The lonely become seen.
The ordinary becomes radiant.
Because Love first noticed us.
And having been fully seen by Him,
we slowly begin seeing with His eyes.
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Redeemed attention may simply be this:
Resting so fully beneath the loving gaze of Christ
that His way of seeing becomes our own.
Until love is no longer merely something we do,
but the way we behold every person He places before us.
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Thank you for lingering with me.
What has Christ been teaching you to notice lately?
I’d love to hear what you’ve discovered.
— Gilda
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© Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.
Wow. That's all I can say. Beautiful and powerful. I want to keep gazing at him that I may see with his eyes of love. One thing I've noticed is that many people, if you truly notice them, are startled because they are unused to being noticed. It feels so good when someone actually sees you, and especially knowing how our Lord does. We don't have to pretend with him.