Thursday, July 13, 2006

Looking Around

Have you ever looked around? I mean really looked around? When you walk into Whole Foods, for example, do you stop and look at the cement beneath your feet? If you have seen the floor at 14th and P then you have seen Retroplate -- a complex concrete that is environmentally friendly and looks beautiful while being very endurable. Or when you step inside an elevator, do you look at its size to see if it is big enough for lots of people or even a casket? What about the panel on the walls? Are they beautiful, making the ride up to the fifth floor more pleasant?

Last Friday, I spent six hours with amazing architects from the SmithGroup. These competent individuals have been hired to create a new Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church. They're not exactly creating a whole new church. We'll keep our sanctuary...but they are doing amazing work to create new space -- space in which we can live, grow, converse, eat, cry, laugh, be challenged, work out, be entertained, and seek to be a community of faith struggling with what it means to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

My tour last week is teaching me to look around -- to observe everything around me -- especially the small details. It is the small details that make things really special, after all. It is the kind smile from someone who hands us a free Express newspaper just before we step on the Metro, or the phone call from a friend who calls out of the blue just to say hello, or the simple details that make a building beautiful.

I'm thankful for the small details.... Now if I can just pay attention to them all instead of thinking that blessings come only in big packages.