One summer day in 1988, I was processing the day’s mail. The first handful of items I tossed into the trash can. The last item in the pile, a succinctly written 3” x 5” postcard, I kept. The card read:

John D. McInnis, senior minister of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Jefferson City, died Sunday morning, July 3, of an apparent heart attack.  A memorial service will be held at First Christian at 11 a.m., Thursday, July 7.

I had last seen Jack at a ministers’ retreat in Jefferson City a few months earlier. His gap-toothed grin, Mississippi drawl, and homespun sense of humor endeared him to many, I suspect, including fresh-out-of-seminary me who looked up to and benefitted from the friendship, wisdom, and ministerial experience of 60+-year-old him. 

Chatting after one of the sessions, Jack told me of the heart attack that had nearly taken his life a few years earlier, the multiple bypass surgery that ensued, and his arduous recovery. I still recall the words with which Jack closed his recounting of that harrowing experience.  I jotted it down in my journal for safekeeping. “When you’ve been through something like that,” he said with his hands folded on his chest and his eyes gazing upward, “every day afterwards is just gravy.”  With a glint in his eye and a warm smile, Jack’s epitaph etched itself upon my mind.  “Every day is gravy.”

Why is it that it takes calamity, catastrophe, or a brush with death to remind us of the preciousness and wonder of life?  Why do our senses become so dulled?  It took the message on the 3” x 5” postcard to remind me of the gift that is life.  Why can’t we remember each and every morning what Jack knew – that every day is gravy.  The Psalmist said, “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Every day. Grace-filled. God-given. Gravy.

At the end of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town, Emily Webb, a young woman who died in childbirth, has an intimate conversation with the stage manager.  The audience is privileged to eavesdrop on their exchange.  The woman has been permitted a parting look at daily life in her small town.  In a poignant final speech, she mourns the fact that she never fully enjoyed the small wonders of day-to-day living. Turning to the stage manager and the audience, she says,

“Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world.
Good-by, Grover’s Corners.
Mama and Papa.
Good-bye to clocks ticking.
And Mama’s sunflowers.
And food and coffee.
And new-ironed dresses and hot baths.
And sleeping and waking up.

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Then she looks toward the stage manager and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?”

The stage manager answers, “No.” Then, after a pause, “The saints and poets, maybe – they do, some.”

As I look back 35 years to that moment at the ministers’ retreat, I realize I was in the presence of one who realized life while he lived it.  Clocks ticking, sunflowers, food and coffee, hot baths, sleeping and waking up.  I have no doubt Jack fully appreciated each one. For him, the last years of his life, every last day, was gravy.

I vowed upon reading of his death and remembering his words that I would strive to awaken each day to a posture of attentiveness – leaning in to listen, eyes wide open, soul receptive. I began a practice I have carried forth, literally, to this day. I made an investment in a pack of index cards, one of which I carry in my pocket every day along with a pen on which I jot down whatever I hear or see that echoes anything at all of God or grace or goodness. Whenever I hear something insightful, inspiring, provocative, or “gospel true,” I write it down. The next morning during my prayer time, I enter the gleanings from the index card into my journal.  Thanks in part to Jack, I began what has become a 35-year personal spiritual mission statement I have distilled into four words: I want to see, perceive, savor, and share.

See. The life of the Spirit begins with paying attention. Poet Mary Oliver says, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Frederick Buechner wrote, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” I’m convinced burning bushes abound. Prayer begins with cupping our hands to our ears and listening closely; squinting through the eyes of faith and watching intently. Emily Dickinson wrote, “The only commandment I ever obeyed was ‘Consider the lilies.’” I want to pay devoted attention to life.

Perceive. During my prayer time each morning, I look over the previous day’s index card on which I wrote what I saw and heard in the hopes of perceiving connections and meaning. Mary Oliver again: “Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?” Each day is a string of pearls bound together by the thin thread of time. The pearls are the encounters, conversations, and observations that comprise a given day. If I take the time to stand back and look at – meditate on – what may seem at first glance to be happenstance occurrences, something of meaning will come into focus. I’ll perceive a truth. Glimpse grace.  Hear the whisper of the Spirit. Jacob famously said upon arising from his dream of the ladder ascending into heaven, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).  The fingerprints of Providence are upon each day.  I want to see them and perceive what they are holding, offering, or pointing toward.      

Savor. I want to take time each day to savor what I’ve seen and perceived.  Savoring can mean everything from expressing gratitude (“Thank you, Lord”) to being caught up in wonder (Mary Oliver for the third time: “Our basic work in life is learning to be astonished”) to basking in the beauty of the arts or something beautifully said or done by someone practicing the fine art of living. Call it bourbon spirituality. Life as God gives it is not meant to be gulped or consumed, but sipped, savored with appreciation for its many-splendored nuance. John Keating, Robin Williams’ character in “Dead Poet’s Society,” quoted Thoreau’s desire “to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life.” The word is savor. 

Share. Having seen, perceived and savored things, I want to share them so others may see and perceive what God is up to, savor it, and pass it on. For me, that sharing begins first thing each morning when I write in my journal and ripples out in teaching, preaching, and conversations I have throughout the day as well as the stories that have made their way into my newsletter columns.  

Invariably, some of the best moments of my day are the ones spent each morning reviewing, remembering and reliving the notations on the index card. There’s no telling how many I’ve covered in scribble over the past four decades. I’m a major stockholder in the index card industry, for sure. And every last one of them – 352 per year x 40 years = 14,080 index cards – is flecked with gravy.