Re-awaken Wonder | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Re-awaken Wonder | Previous Challenge Entry
By Terry R A Eissfeldt
01/18/18
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There was time in my life when every cell in my body was alive to the wonder all around me. But lately I’ve heard my self yawn and sigh at sunrise and sunset. My eyes, drawn more to the computer screen than the beauty that surrounds me, are dull. And a shroud of apathy clings, leaving me heavy and pallid.

It’s when my vision becomes small and insular that a ho-hum attitude sneaks up and envelops me. I’m like the proverbial frog in the kettle. I’ve become narrow minded and ego-centric so that I can’t, or won’t, see, feel, or interact with, what’s going on around me. Boredom easily becomes a kind of death. A death to wonder.

As a child I sat for hours watching summer storms descend upon my small prairie town like mysterious flamboyant magicians. The electricity in the air lifted the hair on my arms and kept my eyes transfixed on the roiling sky. I knew a magic show was about to begin.

The sky, robin-egg blue repainted Oz-like greenish yellow, was the stage. Clouds, formerly a cornucopia of funny zoo animals, transmuted into angry dark-tempered giants.

Will the show open with an ear splitting clap of thunder or the materialization of electric light? Will it rain so hard the sidewalk is flooded by a million dancing horses or will balls of ice be hurled down from an angry god?

These metamorphic moments transported me from my hometown to worlds beyond reality. But now it seems storms are just something to find shelter from.

Louis C K, a comedian, declared in 2008 on the Conan O’Brian Show that “everything is amazing and nobody’s happy?” He goes on to describe the boredom we display when flying in a jet and how easily upset we become with delays and breakdowns. Instead, he points out, everyone on the airplane should be lost in the pure joy of flying. “It’s a chair…in space!”

Is it inevitable, as we leave childhood to embrace adulthood, we trade fascination for facts, curiosity for certainty, and awe for accuracy?

Jesus’s says in *Matthew 18, “I’m telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in.”

So the question is how can I return to “square one”? How do I recapture child-like wonder? And what has that got to do with entering the Kingdom of God?

I believe the answer lies in eternal things: faith, hope and love.

Faith that God is. Hope that He is Good. And a love that incorporates my whole heart, strength and mind.

When I believe God is I see my world through the wonder of a Creator. When I believe He is Good, I see the storm as a journey from something into something new. And when I allow love to infiltrate my whole being I am inoculated from apathy.

Apathy is a type of fear. And perfect love casts out fear.

* The Message

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