Noticing The Familiar

When I receive an online order form my local supermarket, fruit and salad goods are put into a paper carrier bag.  The intention, of course, is to show just how 'green' they are by using paper carriers and not plastic bags.  (The fact that they still use plastic bags for other produce is beside the point!) This has been going on for quite some months so I was surprised the other day to notice something about the paper carrier that I hadn't noticed before.  Apart from their name, there was some other writing on the bag.  I read it and found that it was a useful tip for peeling root ginger.  Why hadn't I noticed that before?  I then started looking at other bags (I don't throw them away but keep them for recycling) to see how many other tips I had missed without realising.

They say that seeing is believing but actually when I read the tip about peeling ginger, I thought about it and then decided I needed to try it just to see if it was as they advocated - and yes, it works exactly as they say it will and so easy.  That's something I will be doing from now on.  Of course it could well be that other people already knew this but it was new to me.  It did set me thinking about how much I just glance over things out of familiarity without really noticing.  How much might I be missing?



We live in an instant, press-button world where things are done so quickly and for efficiency, so it's claimed.  The other day I read on a social media about someone who had gone walking with a friend who walked really slowly. The friend's reasoning behind this was, 'When we walk too fast, we forget to be with each other.'  I like that.  How often in life do we walk so fast that we forget to be present to the moment?  How often do we just skip over things without spending time to really notice or listen?  I guess that as a pensioner, I'm fortunate that I am able to spend possibly a little more time on things - or maybe it just takes me longer now to do things that I did more quickly before!  But seriously, we tend to fill our lives with busyness and so miss much that could be beneficial.  I remember when I first retired there was a real danger of suddenly overfilling my diary thinking that now I had nothing else to do!  Then you find that you're busier than when you had employment.

If only we took notice of God's wisdom, making sure that we have a day of rest.  For those whose 'day of rest' is actually quite busy, maybe you should choose another day to rest.  He also tells us 'Be still and know that I am God'. Stop, look and listen or we'll miss so much of real value, for us and for others.