This week, I was listening to a podcast interview with Sidney Poitier about his new book, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to my Great-Granddaughter.” It was an interesting interview and although I haven’t read the book, I was struck by some of what he described about his process of learning while he was growing up. He learned by observing and by watching his parents and the way they were with one another and the way they treated one another. He also learned by watching those who lived in the small town in the Bahamas that he grew up in as well.

In contrast, I grew up in a world filled with words. We had lots and lots of words in the family that I grew up in, but I really think that it has been the observations that I made in my life that directed my way the most. It was my ability to sift through the words and see the action behind them that cleared the forest for me. I think sometimes we rely too much on words in our lives.

My friend recently sent me a message about a group that she had joined. They meet regularly and knit prayer shawls. To quote her, she said, “It’s an entirely different ministry for me and a silent one.” For this particular friend, it would be incredibly different because she is an excellent wordsmith and public speaking comes easy for her. Even so, she is able to see the value of the silent moments. I think that some of the real gems in life are found in the spaces between the words.

There’s something that you’ll have trouble doing when you are being observant. It’s difficult to focus too much on yourself. The art of being observant is that you will be watching others and considering their patterns and looking at the way they metabolize the most important parts of their lives. Hopefully, you then take the best of what you see and translate it your own life, but while you’re observing, you are focusing your attention outward. I think that’s a good thing.

One of the aspects of Doable Evangelism that I like is the part about noticing others. I think that noticing others takes effort and sometimes it takes more effort than at other times. When we go on a vacation, I call myself the “Lookie Loo.” I am constantly pointing out a rock shape, a deer, a dolphin, or whatever is within my line of sight. I think I do this because my father did this on all of our family vacations growing up. He was the ultimate Lookie Loo and we got to see a lot on our family vacations because of it. What I gleaned from my father by observing him was how to notice what’s going on around me. Later in life, that would translate into an intuition that makes it possible for me to see beneath the layers of the hard shells that most people wear. I don’t think I was necessarily wired any differently from anyone else, but rather trained up in way that made it possible for me to notice what some might often miss.

What we do with our observations, of course, is the action part of the story. We can choose to mentally ridicule or laugh at others or we can seek to better understand them. Obviously, we are going to benefit more from doing the latter. The worst scenario would be not to notice anyone at all. If we never see anyone else, we unconsciously build a wall around ourselves and keep doing what human beings do best–think about ourselves.

Jesus managed to see Zacheus up in the tree, and he noticed when the woman in the crowd touched him. All in all, he was very in tune with who and what was going on around him. Of course, he had intuition that we don’t always have, but maybe if we honed our intuition a little more by practicing the art of being observant, we could have that kind of intuition. It’s worth living up to.