I found myself sitting in the children’s section of church and loving it.

It wasn’t really the children’s section. It was simply the back of the church where parents could sneak in late and, when necessary, make a quick exit with a restless child. With small children, it often seemed less a question of if someone would need to leave than when.

There is something refreshing about children because they have so little pretense. One child was smiling at me. Another was moving around. Someone else was doing one of the countless things children do when adults would prefer they sit still.

They didn’t seem particularly concerned about yesterday or tomorrow.

They were simply there.

Of course, we adults have to teach them how to behave. Sit down. Be quiet. Stand now. Sing now. Don’t crawl under the pew. Don’t turn around and stare at the person behind you.

Eventually they learn how to act like us.

And as I watched them, I began to wonder whether that was entirely an improvement.

I looked around the church at the adults. Some of the concerns in the room had already been spoken aloud during the prayers: cancer, illness, loss, fear. There were undoubtedly many more that had not been spoken.

My body might be sitting in the pew, nodding occasionally to signal that I was listening, but my mind could be almost anywhere.

What needs to be done this afternoon? What will happen next week? What is going to happen to my friend who is sick? Why did someone do that to me? Why did I do that to someone else?

Yesterday. Tomorrow. Everywhere but here.

Years ago, when my son was just beginning to eat solid food, I remember watching him eat with something close to delight. He squealed, tasted things, examined them, played with them.

Eating was an experience.

I was eating the same meal, but I was mostly trying to finish.

Somewhere along the way, many of us become very good at getting through things—meals, workdays, traffic, conversations, weeks.

Sometimes even our lives.

About fifteen years ago, someone told me something I have never forgotten: God is encountered in the present.

I understood the sentence well enough. It has taken me much longer to understand what it means.

God may have been present in my past and may be present in whatever future awaits me, but I cannot live yesterday again, and I cannot live tomorrow yet.

The only place I can actually encounter life—or God—is here.

Now.

I have spent much of my life looking somewhere else for peace and serenity. The more I examined the past, the more confused I sometimes became. The more desperately I tried to control the future, the more uncontrollable life seemed.

And then, strangely enough, I learned something about this from a group of small evergreen trees in Montana.

One spring I took a road trip of nearly 5,000 miles. I saw Death Valley, the redwoods, the Grand Canyon, the rocks and soil around Moab, and eventually Glacier National Park near the Canadian border.

It was outside tourist season and much of the park was closed. During the night, about five inches of snow had fallen.

The next morning I drove into the park.

There was almost no wind. Everything was quiet. Along the road were small evergreen trees covered in fresh snow.

There was nothing spectacular about them in the usual sense. They weren’t the great mountains I had driven all that way to see. They weren’t one of the famous overlooks photographed for calendars.

They were just little trees covered with snow.

But for some reason, they were breathtaking.

For a moment I lost track of time. Actually, I lost track of almost everything.

There wasn’t yesterday.

There wasn’t tomorrow.

There were just those trees.

I have thought about them many times since, and eventually another thought occurred to me that may have affected me even more than seeing them:

Those trees are still there.

I don’t mean that the exact trees necessarily remain unchanged. I mean that what I witnessed did not happen because I happened to be there.

The snow would have fallen that night if I had been a thousand miles away. The morning would have come. The air would have become still. Snow would have rested on those tiny branches.

And that beautiful scene would have existed whether anyone was standing there to admire it or not.

I find that strangely profound.

How many mornings like that have happened there since? How many occurred before I was ever born? How many beautiful things are happening somewhere at this very moment with no one around to photograph them, explain them, post them, or even notice them?

A shaft of sunlight crossing a field.

Snow collecting on a pine branch.

Rain making circles in a pond.

A bird landing on a fence post.

A child discovering the taste of something for the first time.

None of these things needs an audience.

The world keeps producing moments of astonishing beauty whether I am paying attention or not.

Maybe that is what I had misunderstood.

I had driven thousands of miles expecting Glacier National Park to contain something wonderful. Of course I paid attention. I expected beauty there.

But on an ordinary Tuesday morning at home?

I seldom expected very much.

Tuesday was for getting through. Work was for getting through. Dinner was for finishing. Today was something to manage so I could eventually arrive at some better day.

Perhaps ordinary life was never as ordinary as I thought.

Perhaps I had simply stopped expecting to find anything there.

The children in the back of the church may understand something before we teach it out of them.

They don’t need a mountain. They don’t need a vacation. They don’t even need the church service to go according to plan.

Someone smiles at them, and for that moment there is only the smile.

Maybe the invitation isn’t to manufacture more beautiful moments.

They seem to be happening without our help.

Maybe the invitation is simply to be present often enough to notice one.

The trees are still there.

And somewhere, right now, it is snowing.