Lord, what if I miss You? What if I miss You? What if I miss You? Oh, I'm so scared! God, what if I miss You? He answered simply, "Joyce, don't worry; if you miss Me, I will find you.
Hearing God is not all that difficult. If we know the Lord, we have already heard His voice - after all it was the inner leading that brought us to Him in the first place. But we can hear His voice and still miss His best if we don't keep on listening. After the what of guidance comes the when and how.
Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn't a chance.
The difference between hearing and listening is paying attention
Everybody is saying, 'ESPN is not cool, no one is paying attention to ESPN, they're all paying attention to the Barstools of the world.' Why? Because we're authentic.
There's no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that's when it has the best chance of being heard.
We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.
But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.
The main thing was finding this... voice that I had interest in, which I'll call the quiet-yet-stoic voice: the very quiet yet very strong voice that I developed, that people would want to hear and that was worth paying attention to.
There's only one thing worse than not paying attention to girls in gangs - it's paying attention to girls in gangs. The public reaction to girls and women who engage in nontraditional behavior - the hysteria that often surrounds girls in these groups - is almost as interesting as the behavior itself.
We are simply committing ourselves to paying attention to our life. We use meditation to help us in that attention process. We are not trying to become good meditators. We are trying to wake up.
You make a mistake, you better hope I wasn't paying attention and didn't see it, but if I catch you doing it and you think I'm not paying attention, then that's when you get in trouble.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
You think everybody's paying attention to what you're doing. No, they're paying attention to what's interesting to them.
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.
In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.