Making Time for Wonder
It was late at night, or at least, later than I usually find myself driving home. The day had been a long one, and I was tired, my mind full of so many details and to-do list items I still needed to accomplish before my students walked through the door on the first day of the new school year.
Merging onto the freeway, I noticed something odd about the moon. A headline I had seen earlier in the week mentioned an eclipse, but in the midst of my busyness, I hadn’t given it a second thought.
When I got home, it was long past time for me to sleep, with an early day ahead of me, but I went outside and took some time to enjoy the wonder of a ruddy moon with a gleaming sliver of brightness where the eclipse had begun to recede.
As I gazed at the eclipse, I thought of God, and His creation, designed to be so perfectly practical, and yet full of beauty. I wondered at the brightness of the moon, just peeking out from behind the eclipse’s veil. I marveled that I had even gotten to see the eclipse at all—it just “happened” to be this night, the night when I was driving home at the right time to see it, and it “happened” to be in the right part of the sky for me to be able to watch from my house.
It felt like God put the eclipse there just for me, just for that night when I was so weary and focused on earthy things. In a way, it drew my attention away from my plodding feet and fixed it on my Creator.
That’s what nature is supposed to do: point to the Creator. This passage from Psalms captures the sense of wonder we get when we glimpse the Creator through His creation:
“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and stars, which Thou hast ordained;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of Him? And the son of man that Thou visitest Him?
For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
O Lord our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:3-9)
Have you ever looked at something in nature and suddenly felt very small? I think that’s the feeling David is trying to convey in this psalm, that sense of wonder and awe and grandeur that makes you marvel that you exist at all, and that God knows and loves you.
I was at the coast on a writing trip a short time ago, and ended up out walking the beach at low tide one morning. I have only ever gone tidepooling once in my life that I remember, and was astonished at what I found in the cracks, crevices, and little caves at the base of the large rocks that the ocean usually covers. Starfish wearing colors I had never seen before, urchins, flocks of mussels clinging to the rocks, and as I walked on down the shore, there were clear jellyfish, like pieces of glass, sparkling in the sunlight like precious gems.
I could have walked straight past the rocks, as I had other days. I could have marched my way across the jellyfish without so much as a glance down at them. But I didn’t. I took time to look, to examine, to appreciate the beauty right there at my feet. And you know what? My perspective shifted. By the time I was back at in my room again, God seemed a lot bigger, and my problems seemed a lot smaller.
That’s the value of wonder: it points us to things about God we’ve forgotten in the midst of our hurried days and weeks.
Dear Reader, does God seem small to you this week? Does life seem big and full of obstacles too big to get over? Take time, even just a few moments to gaze up at the sunlight through the leaves of a tree, or a raindrop on a window. It’s often the smallest details of creation that point the most compellingly to the Creator.
Let wonder reset your perspective, then talk to God about it all.
“The heavens declare His righteousness, and all the people see His glory.”Psalm 97:6