In the summer of 2000, a group of young pipers and drummers from Northern Ontario traveled to Scotland to compete in the World Pipe Band Championships. I was one of them, and for a bunch of players from our part of the world it was a dream come true.
I had played the Highland bagpipe since I was a boy, and I took it very seriously. I was not content to play the occasional tune. I was on a mission to master the instrument, which meant my parents endured years of screeching and squawking echoing through the house. I still owe them for that.
We did not win. But the competition was not the best part of the trip anyway. While we were in Glasgow I had the chance to hear Willie McCallum play at the National Piping Centre. If you know anything about Highland piping, you know that name. He is one of the most decorated pipers in the history of the instrument.
I remember being completely mesmerized. His fingers moved across the chanter in a way that seemed almost supernatural, and the embellishments were executed with a precision I had never seen before. For those few minutes the outside world faded away. There was nothing but the music.
Have you ever had an experience like that? Have you ever been so captivated by something that you lost track of everything around you?
Looking back, what has stayed with me is not the playing. It is the way everything else fell away. We do not give that kind of attention to much. Most of what fills a day gets a piece of us and nothing more. And when it comes to our relationship with God, that is exactly the kind of attention we were made for.
So here is a question worth sitting with. How many of us are captivated by our connection with the Lord? When we come before Him, in worship, in prayer, in His Word, or in quiet reflection, are we so focused on Him that everything else fades? Or has our time with God quietly become one more item on the list?
Luke 10 gives us two women who show us two different answers.
“Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word” (Luke 10:38-39).
Jesus is nearing the end of His earthly ministry here. He is traveling toward Jerusalem and the cross, teaching as He goes and preparing His disciples for what is coming. The village is Bethany, just over the Mount of Olives, about two miles from the place where His body would soon be laid.
This was not simply a stop along the road. Martha, Mary and their brother Lazarus were dear friends of His, and this was a house where He could rest. So Martha welcomed Him in, and we should notice that her hospitality was a good thing. It was a real expression of love. She believed in Jesus, she understood who was under her roof, and she wanted to care for Him. Service matters. Jesus Himself taught that again and again. Martha’s desire to serve was not the problem. Service is a good thing. It is just not the only thing.
Then there is Mary, seated at the Lord’s feet, listening. We should not pass over that quickly. To sit at a teacher’s feet was to take the posture of a disciple, and in that day women were not given that privilege. The rabbis did not teach women the way they taught men. Yet here is Jesus welcoming Mary’s desire to learn. Her choice was deliberate, and it was bold. She was saying that she did not care what the room thought of her. What she cared about was being near Jesus and hearing what He had to say.
That is the attitude of a believer. Eager to learn, eager to grow, eager to be close to the Lord. Mary understood who Jesus was. She believed Him when He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6). She was not sitting at the feet of a wise teacher. She was sitting at the feet of God in the flesh, hearing the truth from His own mouth. There is nothing more captivating than that.
Martha was in a different place.
“But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me’” (Luke 10:40).
Think about what is happening. Martha believes in Jesus too. She opened her home to Him. But in this moment she has lost sight of what matters most. The Lord of the universe is sitting in her house, and she is too busy with the preparations to notice.
And that happens to us. We can be so consumed with our responsibilities and the demands of the day that we miss the moments that matter most. We may genuinely believe, we may serve faithfully, we may want to please Him, and still lose sight of the one thing.
Notice too that when her priorities slipped, her attitude went with them. Martha had become agitated. She had lost the joy of serving and let irritation take its place. “Lord, do You not care?” That is quite a thing to say to the One who came to save her, the One who loved her, the One speaking words of life in her own living room. She was so absorbed in her own situation that she could not see what was being offered to her.
Before we are too hard on Martha, it is worth asking; what is getting in the way for us? What is keeping us from our time with God? What is keeping us from worship? What small and passing thing are we letting take precedence over our relationship with the God of all creation? We all have our Martha moments, where we forget what is essential and attend only to what is immediate.
But this account does not only show us the problem. It provides the answer.
“But the Lord answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:41-42).
Notice how gentle that is. Jesus is correcting her, but tenderly. Martha, Martha. He is not dismissing her work or her love for Him. He is redirecting her. In the end, her worry over the details is not what is most important. The one thing necessary is what Mary has chosen, to be in His presence and to listen to His words.
That does not mean that we abandon our responsibilities or stop serving others. It means that our service should flow out of our connection with God instead of allowing service, to crowd it out. What we do for Him should be the overflow of our relationship with Him.
David understood this. “One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the Lord And to meditate in His temple” (Psalm 27:4). David asked for only one thing. The man after God’s own heart wanted nothing more than to be in the presence of God. That was the pursuit of his life.
So let us not treat our time with God as something to be fitted in once the rest of the list is finished. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
And here is what I keep coming back to from that afternoon in Glasgow. I sat there mesmerized by a man playing an instrument, and he was worth being mesmerized by. But God is more captivating than any musician. He is more absorbing than any book, more gripping than any film, more satisfying than anything else we could give our attention to. He surpasses every earthly pursuit.
So let us not let the busyness of life, or the pull of entertainment, or the weight of work, or the chase after things keep us from the most important relationship we have. Let us be captivated by the one thing necessary. Let us sit at His feet, behold His beauty, and live in His truth.