Researcher Arthur C. Brooks’ artist mother painted with watercolor. Brooks writes:

Over her many-decades career… her one constant in her work, however, was excellent technique… Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw. This baffled me because that’s obviously what I thought I had been doing, as I said to her.

“You probably aren’t,” she explained. “People almost never actually look carefully at anything; they glance at it and then rely on their brain to fill in the details—which it doesn’t, leading to crummy drawing.” So I did as I was told, and looked long and hard at what I wanted to draw at that moment: a tree. I found that I noticed much more about its contours, colors, and shadows. I drew each detail, meticulously—and sure enough, it turned out to be a pretty well-drawn tree.

More than that, I loved the experience of really looking: It was both creative and immersive. What my mom was telling me to do, I came to understand, was savor the encounter of seeing something deeply and drawing it carefully. And this kind of savoring, it turns out, can be applied to many areas of life in ways that help us become more adept at living and much happier.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1. Gratitude, Thanksgiving -- Savoring has been defined as “the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” In other words, focusing on an experience in order to give thanks.
2. Savoring could also mean paying attention to Scripture or the character of God, etc.