What if God isn't showing up — and you're just finally waking up?
Week two of Unforced starts with a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, who came home from a walk with his dog covered in burrs and, instead of grumbling and brushing them off like every human before him, put one under a microscope. That's where Velcro came from. The burr was always sticky. Nature was never hiding anything. Somebody finally looked. From there Chad runs the invisible-gorilla experiment as the frame — you don't see the world, you see what you're looking for — and asks the question the rest of the morning sits on: what is your filter doing to God?
That lands in Genesis 28, a story he says he's never preached in eleven years here. Jacob, on the run after conning his brother, sleeps on a rock and dreams of a stairway. Notice what the dream is not: nothing descends, nothing arrives. The stairway is already resting on the earth, the traffic is already running, and Jacob has camped in the middle of the interchange without knowing it. "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it." Nothing changed about that patch of desert — Jacob woke up. Which makes the modern vocabulary of "bringing the presence" to a city sound strange: the whole point of the story where Bethel gets named is that the presence was already in Luz. Nobody brings God to San Antonio. He isn't missing. The only thing a church has ever brought to a city is its attention — or its lack of it.
The back half turns noticing from a mood into a skill: Moses and a bush that was already burning, and the woman in Mark 5 whose one touch Jesus felt inside a crushing crowd — the person every other filter deleted, handed back the name nobody had spoken over her in twelve years. Then the research. Dacher Keltner's awe walks, where fifteen minutes a week and one instruction changed how people saw their ordinary days, and their selfies started holding less self and more world. Simone Weil went further: attention, in its purest form, simply is prayer — "the rarest and purest form of generosity." The question isn't whether your attention is being trained. It is. The question is what you're practicing, and whether you picked it.
In this episode:
Biomimicry, and how a dog covered in burrs became Velcro
Why last week's practice has no scoreboard — "nothing happens even if you miss it"
The invisible gorilla: you don't see the world, you see what you're looking for
Jacob at Bethel — the stairway was already there, the traffic already running
Maqom and HaMaqom: "he is the place of the world, and the world is not his place"
Nobody brings God to San Antonio — a city named for the finder of lost things
Moses and the bush that was already burning
Mark 5: the one touch Jesus felt in a crushing crowd, and the word "daughter"
Attention as what turns an "it" into a "thou"
Dacher Keltner's awe walks — and the selfies with less self in them
Simone Weil: attention as generosity, and as prayer
The practice: one 15-minute awe walk this week, phone at home
References: Genesis 28 (Jacob at Bethel) · Exodus 3 (the burning bush, The Message) · Mark 5 (the woman in the crowd) · Leviticus 15 · Dacher Keltner on awe · Simone Weil on attention · Martin Buber, I and Thou · Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Series: Unforced
Speaker: Chad Belew
Date: 8/16/2026
Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX
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The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX
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