The Sunday Letter
I am going to let you in on a little secret about these Sunday letters. I do not actually roll out of bed at a quarter to six on a Sunday morning, put on the coffee, bang out a letter and a Porch Light, and hit send at six just as this lands in your inbox. I know. None of you pictured me doing that anyway. But the truth of how it really works is worth telling, because somewhere along the way it changed me, and it might be worth something to you too.
What actually happens is that I carry you around all week. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the whole week long, there is a quiet question running: what is the little piece of the South I get to hand these good folks come Sunday? And because that question is always on, I move through my ordinary days watching for the answer. I notice things I would have walked straight past a few years ago. The light doing something over a field on the drive home. A thing somebody says in the checkout line. A sound in the trees at first light. All week, I am looking for the bit of this good world worth sharing with you.
And here is what I did not see coming when I started. The looking is the gift. Long before any of it ever becomes a letter, the plain habit of going through the week on the lookout for something beautiful to pass along has made my own weeks richer than they used to be. You cannot hunt for grace all week and come up empty-handed. You cannot keep an eye out for the handiwork of God and find there is none. The world is fairly stuffed with it. Most of us just are not looking, and I was not either, until I had a reason to be.
You have seen the proof of it these last few weeks, though you did not know that was what you were reading. Some weeks the thing that caught me was a farmers market going up in a park before the crowds arrived. One week it was the birds turning back up in the yard of a morning. A couple of weeks ago it was nothing grander than an ordinary drive with my wife on which not one memorable thing happened. None of those were remarkable on paper. They became something only because I was paying attention, carrying you, looking for them.
So that is the little secret, and now I will let you in on the better half of it. You do not need a newsletter to live this way. You do not need a deadline, or an audience, or a thing to send on Sunday. You only need the question running in the back of your mind. Go through this coming week on the lookout. Decide, before it even starts, that you are going to catch this good world in the act of being beautiful, and then watch how much of it you begin to see. The grace was always there. The paying attention is the part that is left to us.
And this week I am going to ask something of you for the first time. If you go looking and something stops you in your tracks, a sight, a small kindness, a plain moment that turns out not to be plain at all, write and tell me about it. You can reach me any time at bill@blessedsouth.com. I would love to know what this good world is handing you out there, and every so often, with your blessing, I would like to share a few of them right here on a Sunday. I will never use your name. The privacy stays yours and the credit stays yours. I will just pass the beauty along, the way you and I have been doing all this time.
Take a minute with that today. Then go through your week with your eyes open, and if the South hands you something worth passing on, you know where to find me.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
I spend my weeks now trying to pay attention to God, looking for Him in the light on a field and the sound in the trees before dawn. I wrote about that up above. But there is a flip side to it that humbles me every time I slow down enough to think about it, and it is this. The whole time I am working so hard to notice Him, He has never once stopped noticing me.
“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.” — Psalm 139:1-3
Read that slowly, because it is almost too much to take in. While I am congratulating myself for catching one pretty sunrise out of the hundred I drove straight past, the God who made the sunrise already knows the kind of day I am having before I am out of bed. He knows when I sit down. He knows the road I am on, and the thoughts I have not said out loud, and the ones I would be ashamed to. There is not a single plain, unwatched Tuesday anywhere in my life. He has been paying the very kind of attention to me that I am only now, well into my years, learning to pay to a field at sunup.
And here is what steadies me about it, rather than unsettles me. His attention is not a camera running cold in a corner, keeping score. The same hand that made all the beauty I spend my week hunting is the hand that made me, and it has never looked away. We go through our days half believing we are invisible, that nobody is really watching and nobody would notice much if we quietly slipped out of the room. The verse says the exact opposite is true, and always has been, of every last one of us.
So by all means go through this week with your eyes open, looking for Him. It is a good way to live, and I recommend it. But rest in this while you do it. Long before you ever thought to look up, you were already fully seen, fully known, and fully loved by the very One you are looking for. A porch light does not only shine so you can find your way home. It shines because somebody inside has been watching the road for you the whole time. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.