you won't find him in seminary...

"'I couldn't have found God in seminary,' he thought, as he looked at the sunrise." The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I am reading The Alchemist right now and it is a book that has already largely become a part of my life. I have scrawled notes all over the margins and consulted my Bible while reading this book more than any other book I have read for leisure.

After reading the above line, I went to my journal and wrote:

I love this. It reminded me that sometimes the place we most expect to find God - to experience him, to feel him, to meet him - is really not that place at all. God is in the sunrises. In the purple mountains' majesty. In the oceans' tides. In the turning leaves of October. In the smile of a friend or a hug. In between claspd fingers of two people in love. In prayers whispered in the desperate hour. He's not in church or seminary anymore than he's outside those places, in the magnifecence of the world around us. He's real and is sometimes most profoundly revealed in the simplest act of beauty, not in some complex theology lecture. We too often expect to find him where we think we should be looking and end up not noticing him in the places he really is and where he wants us to find him, where he is waiting for us to find him: in the midst of our everyday lives. Waiting to romance us with his senseless, supernatural miracles of the simplest things that we're often times too busy to notice. He's there. Watch for him.

And later, the author echoes this idea: "When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises."

It's become my favorite book of all time. I have just about filled an entire journal reflecting on it. It makes me want to go to the "old and wise" desert and be silenced by the elemental force of it. Or to God and be silenced by the awesomeness of him.