I learned to say “amen” before I could spell it. It means something like so be it. A seal. The end of the prayer.
But here’s what I was thinking this morning. What if amen is also the moment we get up and walk out of the room? A quiet little ritual that says: okay, prayer’s done. God was here for a minute. Back to the day now.
I don’t think I believe that anymore. I don’t think you can walk out.
There’s no door into God’s presence. No door out of it. He’s everywhere, all the time — whether I notice or not. My awareness doesn’t move him. It only moves me.
And that’s the part I keep getting stuck on. Not whether he’s here. I believe he’s here. The hard part is staying aware of it. I forget. Constantly. I get into the car, into the work, into the next thing, and hours go by and I haven’t thought about him once. Not because I stopped believing. Because I’m distracted, and presence is quiet, and the day is loud.
So I started using the birds.
We have a lot of them where we live. Wild ones. I can’t control them — they come and go as they please. Sometimes I’m driving and one cuts fast across the windshield. Sometimes I’m sitting at home waiting on something and they just show up. Some days I don’t see a single one — but I hear them, singing somewhere I can’t see.
And I’ve trained myself, slowly. Every time I notice a bird, I think — oh. Right. You’re here. And it brings me back. That’s the whole thing. A bird, a sentence, and for a second I’m aware of God again.
It works because of my reality. I see birds every day, many times a day, and I can’t schedule them. They interrupt me. That’s exactly why they’re good for this — I’m not the one deciding when to remember. Something outside me decides, and all I have to do is let it land.
I don’t think it has to be birds. That’s just mine. For you it might be a sound, the first sip of coffee, your kid’s voice in the other room. Something already in your day that shows up on its own, that you didn’t summon. The trigger isn’t the point. Being pulled back is the point.
But here’s where it goes deeper. The birds come back because of Joana.
She feeds them. And it’s not nothing — not a bag of seed tossed in the yard. She researches it. The right food. Clean water. Vitamins, even. She reads about what they actually need, and then she goes and gets it. Every day. Quietly. Nobody asked her to.
She’s not doing it for a photo. She’s doing it because there are small living things outside our window, and she has decided they matter. That their little lives are worth her attention and her work.
And they come back. More of them. Daily.
This is just who she is. She loves the creation around her — really loves it, with her hands and her time, not in the abstract. I’ve gotten to watch it up close for years now, and I think it’s done more to shape how I see God than most of what I’ve read.
Because she taught me the other half of this. The trigger pulls me back — but Joana is the reason there’s something to be pulled back to. My awareness isn’t only a happy accident I stumble into. It’s also something I can feed. Do the boring, repeated, unglamorous work of putting out the right food — and the thing I’ve been feeding comes back. More and more.
So I can cultivate this. Even here. Even in L.A. — a city built to keep you moving, keep you distracted, keep you from ever sitting still long enough to hear anything sing.
A trigger to bring me back. A feeder to keep full.
Which brings me back to amen.
Joana never says amen to the birds. She doesn’t open a session and then close it. The water just stays clean. The food just stays out. It’s not an event — it’s a standing arrangement. A life she’s built around paying attention.
That’s what Brother Lawrence was after, I think. A monk who spent his days washing dishes in a monastery kitchen, and said he felt God as near at the sink as he did at the altar. No starting. No amen. No walking out. Just a continuous turning toward Someone who was never not there.
So maybe I don’t need to enter God’s presence. I just need to stop forgetting it. Find the thing in my day I can’t control — the bird that cuts across the windshield — and let it bring me back. Again and again. Keep the water clean. Keep the feeder full.
So find your bird. Whatever it is for you. And let it keep bringing you back.