The Wonder of It All...

Today was a beautiful, lazy day for me. I had to be lazy today for I will not get another one to enjoy for quite some time. With the holidays almost here, business is happily getting busy.

I went to the early service at the Vineyard; thus finding myself back on my couch in my PJs by 10:30. I watched Batman Begins with my sister, had some pizza for lunch, took a nap, and watched a lot of home improvement shows.

Tangent: These home improvement are quickly becoming my favorite genre of TV shows because of the ginormous fact that I have started the process of buying a house…that if all things go smoothly…I’ll be sleeping in the weekend after Thanksgiving.

I also found myself continuing my reading of Blue Like Jazz this afternoon. Some good stuff. Below is an excerpt I felt compelled to share with you. If you need a book to loosen up the soil of your soul, this is a great book to pick up.

Donald Miller writes:

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

When I think about the complexity of the Trinity, the three-in-one God, my mind cannot understand, but my heart feels wonder in abundant satisfaction. It is as though my heart, in the midst of its euphoria, is saying to my mind, ‘There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.’

I want to tell you something about me that you may see as weakness. I need wonder. I know that death is coming. I smell it in the wind, read it in the paper, watch it on television, and see it on the faces of the old. I need wonder to explain what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us when this thing is done, when our shift if over and our kids’ kids are still on the earth listening to their crazy rap music. I need something mysterious to happen after I die. I need to be somewhere else after I die, somewhere with God, somewhere that wouldn’t make any sense if it were explained to me right now.

At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don’t think there is any better worship than wonder