A Sense of Wonder

The older you get, the harder it is to fill your life with wonder, and its not just that our lives tend to get filled with the mundane and the commonplace. We also live, in the words of Tim Keller, in the most wonder-killing culture that ever existed.

So, driving cross the mountains of Northern Portugal in the early morning with septembral mists swirling through the valleys and the emerging colours of autumn beginning to tinge the vineyards in russets and ambers, it was good to feel that sense of wonder restored.

Wonder in a God of seasons who creates everything perfectly in its place, who changes and yet is ever the same, who demonstrates his power in totally amazing ways. And it’s not just about enjoying nature and this world we live in. But the way He works in people’s lives, the way He powerfully intervenes, the way He gently show His compassion, just when we need it. The way He speaks quietly but insistently. The way he picks us up when we’re down, and knocks us down in our arrogance and our complacency.

Back to Tim Keller again. In the sermon I quoted above, he also spoke about how we try to escape the mundanity and the ordinariness, because we need wonder in our lives.

“...We jaded contemporary western people go to the stupidest summer blockbuster movies, poorly acted, terrible character development, nothing but special effects and we lay our money down, and you know why ..... because we need to know a sense of wonder in our lives .... that fleeting realisation that there’s more to life than all this..... that there are mysterious and stupendous powers out there that can come into our impossible situation...”