Hello Bridge Town Church and those of you joining us today, my name is Bethany Allen and this is the Bridge Town Daily.

Well here we are a couple weeks into quarantine life and I wonder if any of you are feeling what I've been feeling over the last few days.

It seems that the adrenaline and rush of the pandemic has faded a bit and the realities of a new way of life, as well as the grief over what has and is happening around us is beginning to settle in.

My Sabbath this week was really one of the first days I've stopped working over the past few weeks and while I was hoping for an encounter or revelation or some kind of big moment with God, what I was met with instead was a lot of stillness and quiet and presence.

And it was in that space that I for the first time in weeks actually felt like I took a breath spiritually speaking.

There was no great exegesis before me, no radical expression or form of worship. It was just me on my floor in my apartment.

My job and temperament alike afford me the liberty and times like these to push through with joy and resilience.

I love taking care of people and I've always loved helping others in the larger scheme of things and in the smaller places.

And because of that I pay close attention to the people around me. I watch their moods and listen to their tone, their body language, their over or under use of words, where their eyes settle in a room or in a moment.

But I realized this week that while I could list off an assessment of how others were doing, I couldn't say the same for myself.

On my Sabbath, God, who is the better helper met with me and gently and kindly reminded me that I wasn't aware of how I was really doing.

I was not aware of how broken I felt over the loss and grief of this epidemic, over the weariness of my petitions, over the loss of financial resources for so many in our church, over the impact of how the loss of touch impacts my sense of comfort in place.

I figured responses that now loom in both my body and my mind as the ever changing tide of our climate activates the memory of a season from the past with similar realities.

And it was there through tears in my frailty that I wept for the first time in all of this before Jesus and allowed him to call me back to a place of noticing to a place where I was able to pay attention to what was happening inside of me and around me.

Central to the practice of peace for the apprentice of Jesus is something called the discipline of notice or what contemplatives call holy noticing.

And though I believe it's a lost spiritual discipline, it is one that is essential to the life of an apprentice, particularly in a moment like this.

The discipline of notice is an exercise that's done with the intention of becoming more aware of your thoughts and your emotions and your environment as well as the Holy Spirit's presence in and around you.

It allows for you to be fully present and mindful in each moment to what God has given and what God is giving to move away from the tyranny of what could be or what wasn't to what is.

It's the place where we notice the world and notice it with a holy purpose.

Throughout his life here on earth, we saw Jesus do this very thing in Mark chapter five, we see him with the woman with the issue of blood.

And in that story, we see that he both noticed her touch as well as the power leaving him when he touched her.

And again, in John chapter four, we see that he was able to look beyond the woman at the well and her presentation and circumstances to the true need within her.

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