The event of April 8, 2024, only happens every few decades. It was the day of a total solar eclipse.
The path of the eclipse included northern Ohio, so several of our family members secured an Airbnb for the weekend and positioned ourselves to watch. What an amazing show! The moon slowly covered the face of the sun until we were left with some blazing fringes around an enclosed circle. The sky went dark, the birds went silent, and the temperature dropped. We all verbally or mentally said, “Wow!”
Wonder is the WOW factor. When we look up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, savor a meal at a five-star restaurant, or sit enraptured at a Mozart symphony, our mouths form a wordless WOW. We stand in wonder at that which is beautiful and magnificent.
Poets and songwriters are people who write and sing about wonder. No wonder the Psalms are full of God’s wonder. Here are a few examples:
- “Show me the wonders of your great love” (Psalm 17:7)
- “You have multiplied . . . your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us” (Psalm 40:5)
- “Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord” (Psalm 89:5)
- “Open my eyes, that I may behold/wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18)
- “I will meditate on your wondrous works” (Psalm 119:27)
- “Your testimonies are wonderful; / therefore my soul keeps them” (Psalm 119:129).
Wonder calls us to stop, to take it all in, to absorb beauty and majesty and otherworldliness — something bigger than ourselves. Wonder is the cause of astonishment and incites rapt attention; wonder produces awe. In his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Dacher Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel describes the Bible as “the perpetual motion of the spirit, an ocean of meaning.” Describing the Bible as an “ocean of meaning” fits Keltner’s definition of awe.
We’re in short supply of the WOW factor these days. Heschel writes, “We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach then how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.” Yet, according to Keltner and fellow psychologist Paul Riff, “research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another.” “Unfortunately,” writes Christine Aroney-Sine, “the research also suggests that we are awe-deprived.” We are healthier people when our lives are wonder filled.
The Bible brings God’s wonder, a sense of awe, into our lives. How is the Bible a wonder-full and awe-full book? Here are some examples:
- Wonder is when, after years of life in the Bible, you still find new things when you read, hear, study, memorize or meditate on it. The wonder of discovery keeps drawing you back.
- Wonder is when you reflect on how you have changed over the years and how the Bible has been the impetus for change.
- Wonder is when you see new believers “hold” the Bible and change long-held values and behaviors as they read it. What a miracle!
The things that bring wonder to our lives also brings delight. Wonder and pleasure are tied together in the Scriptures. The psalmist understood the nature of delight when he wrote, “Blessed is the man” whose “delight is in the law of the LORD” (Psalm 1:1-2). In Psalm 119, the author again and again refers to God’s Word as a delight:
- “In the way of your testimonies I delight/as much as in all riches.” (14)
- “I will delight in your statutes . . .” (16)
- “Your testimonies are my delight . . .” (24)
When I experience God’s delight, I step back in awe and worship. Delight is a joy magnet, drawing us back again and again to enjoy the pleasure found in God’s words — a pleasure that is beautiful. The psalmist spoke of this beauty when he wrote: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, / that will I seek after: . . . to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD/and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). David seeks God because there’s a beauty about His person.
“Beauty” writes Elaine Scarry, “quickens. It adrenalized. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living.” St Augustine says, “It is desire for the beautiful that draws us to God.” Author Joan Chittister writes, “Beauty transports us. It refuses to be dull. It . . . changes the spiritual life from an experience of rules to an expression of aw.” Beauty is an unspoken partner in holding the Word; the Word’s beauty breaks through the dullness of a life giving us a feeling of wonder and delight.
What is there about God’s word that strikes the chord of beauty in your heart? How can you cultivate a spirit of wonder as you read the Scriptures? I explore the beauty, wonder, and delight of holding God’s words in my newest book: Holding the Word: Five Ways to Encounter God through the Scriptures.
You can pre-order the book at NavPress (navpress.org) or wait until the release date of April 8. When we hold God’s word, we hold something that brings the WOW factor into our lives. Holding the Word brings deep pleasure and delight, awakening us to God’s beauty. Take time to hold His word this coming week.
Great thoughts on wonder! I’ve long read articles on longevity as a hobby (not a passion, fetish, obsession, mind you LOL). Observing wonder, especially in NATURE or God’s creation, is creeping into the research findings. Fascinating! Wonderful! I heard you talking with one retirement class member about the writing group you’ve pondered. I don’t know if I’ve ever share a sample of what I send out to an email list, post on FACEbook, and is published still in our hometown newspaper, The Alliance Review (circulation 15,000). Here is one.
THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED By Pastor Rick Sams
Mabel lived 25 years in a state-run institution for those with low income. Her roommates scream, they do not talk intelligibly, and they cannot control their bladder or bowels. Mabel is 89, wears a big hearing aid, is blind, and has a cancer that has partially taken her face so that she drools constantly.
Yet Mabel is grateful.
Her heart is full of gratitude and her disfigured face radiates joy. When asked what she thought about all day there in her dark, nearly soundless, world with the stench of death and disease all around her, she answered: “I think about my Jesus, and how good He’s been to me.” And then she broke into this barely understandable hymn she had memorized a long time ago:
“Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all;
He gives me strength from day to day, without Him I would fall.
When I am sad, to Him I go; no other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, He makes me glad, He’s my friend.”*
Are you reaching for a tissue? Feeling guilty for whining over trivia? You’d have to have ice water running through your veins to be unmoved by Mabel’s story.
How often are we privileged to see this kind of spiritual power and contentment? Was Billy Graham or Mother Theresa endued with any more grace, gratitude and joy from Jesus than Mabel? She not only witnesses to her Lord, but walks as He walked: “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps….Jesus, full of grace…full of joy through the Holy Spirit” (I Peter 2:21; John 1:14, 17; Luke 10:21).
Mabel grasped the reality and comfort from some of Jesus’ farewell words: “In this world you may have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world!” (John 16:33).
How can we, not just quote those words, but have them stir and strengthen our soul?
Maybe we need to look for real joy, contentment and the abundant life in the RIGHT places. Those grieving graveyard visitors looking for their Lord that first Easter morning were challenged by the angels watching Christ’s tomb: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen!” (Luke 24:1-6).
So many of us today are like them, looking for life in all the wrong places; looking for life in “dead” things. We think we’ll get our life back by the lifting of the darkness of depression, or getting a better diagnosis or being able to visit this place or that person. Or eating our favorite food, and, of course, posting a picture of it on Facebook. Surely winning something with my March Madness bracket will do it.
Those all lead to dead ends, not real life as Jesus promised: “I came that you may have life, life more abundantly” (John10:10). So many places where we seek real life over-promise, but under-deliver life; rewarding and real.
Try looking for abundant life in the same place Mabel did—in gratitude and in Jesus–instead of the “graveyards” where you’ve been looking.
(* The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg, p. 24)