This is me, sharing my life...transparently.
They knew the night sky well enough to notice a rogue star when no one else did.
They paid attention.
They were not Jewish but knew of the foretelling of the King of the Jews.
They were informed.
Even though they expected a King, they bowed at the feet of an infant.
They were humble.
When Herod told them a bold-faced lie, they went on their way.
They understood human nature.
When they had a dream telling them not to report back to Herod they listened.
They listened to God.
I never got poetry. Lord knows my English teachers tried. But when you throw in a melody, some harmony, and maybe even an orchestra, I am hooked. Music is the greatest gift! Music soothes and it heals. It changes a dull day to something joyful. And you don’t have to be talented to enjoy it. In my case, it is a tool God has used to comfort and inspire me time and time again.
One of the all time great songs in my life is Stephen Curtis Chapman’s Great Adventure with the Prologue on the album. Step back into 1992 and read a portion of what this song has to say.
We'll travel long, over mountains so high
We'll go through valleys so low
Still through it all we'll find that
This is the greatest journey that the human heart will ever see
The love of God will take us far beyond our wildest dreams
Saddle up your horses, we've got a trail to blaze
Through the wild blue yonder of God's amazing grace
Let's follow our leader into the glorious unknown
This is a life like no other, whoa whoa this is the great adventure
And here is a link to the song. Enjoy!
I love a good adventure story: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, that sort of story. The elements of an adventure are the following: they have a hero, a quest, a villain, an unknown dangerous environment, a big risk and a transformation. This also perfectly describes a well-lived life of a Christian. Christ-following is not a boring life. It is a life lived to the fullest.
Stephen Curtis Chapman, who wrote the aforementioned song suffered an incredible tragedy years after writing it. The highs come with lows. Many of my friends are blessed with amazing marriages that some people look for their entire life and never find. Some of those same people are now living in the reality of widowhood, struggling everyday to try to pick up one foot and put it in front of the other. And I have seen those who have been given the strongest bodies struggling to survive another day of cancer. It seems the higher our highs or the bigger the blessings, the more pronounced the lows. I cannot explain it. I can’t understand it.
Life IS a great adventure full of majestic peaks and low dark valleys, boring endless deserts and beautiful boundless springs of joy. So what can we do about it? Hang on for the ride of your life and follow your Leader into the great unknown. Celebrate the highs, mourn the lows and realize that you are not in control. Adopt an attitude of joy in the big adventure because we know how the story ends.
Walt Disney gave us talking mice with feelings and an agenda and we flock to Disney World to feed our stunted imaginations. Why? Maybe because we don’t take the time to see the amazing magical world in our own mind and at our own fingertips. We teach our children that imagination belongs in Florida and not in our house or our schools. So we are bored and watch TikTok.
But here is the thing. We have to be astute observers to see humor, enigma, beauty and enlightening contrasts in our own daily life. We have trained ourselves to only worship the God of our limited expectations, only see art in an art museum, only laugh when we watch a show that is listed as a comedy, only relax and look around when we are on an expensive vacation, only see mystery in a carefully crafted story-line of a crime drama and only use our imagination in Disney World. We have compartmentalized our lives. We have made our lives mundane. Yep, I said it. Boring! And we are solely responsible for our own boredom. I say this because I have been made aware of the amazing, crazy world around me through a book called Notes From The Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder In God’s Spoken World by N. D. Wilson. This book is not for everyone. The author has a strange sense of humor that I find fascinating. Don’t rush out and buy it with great expectations. It is a very different sort of book. It may not resonate with many the way it did with me but the idea behind it needs to be told. The author makes some valid points that we never hear.
God created so much that we miss because we are too busy to pay attention or we have put God’s creations in a box like everything else. Just last Sunday as I was sitting in church listening to the music, my eyes were opened. I worshipped with my eyes! There was a mom in the pew in front of me with a very young baby. This tiny baby was just learning to hold up her head. From my perspective, I could only see her fuzzy head and her perfect hand grasping her mother’s side. With tears in my eyes, I worshipped God for this amazing creation. Then I looked up and saw the most brilliant jewel colored light brightly beaming in through the stained glass window and had another moment. This open-eyed amazement was a gift God gave me.
Some of the best humor is not from Jerry Seinfeld, not that there is anything wrong with that. Some of the best humor comes from God. You know, his Son is Jewish. Was this an accident? I think not. One example of God’s humor was the day my Labrador Retriever saw a bunny in the back yard. Thinking she could never catch that rabbit, I told her to get it just to watch her happily chase it. Unbeknownst to me, that rabbit didn’t know the way out and my dog came back to me victorious and proud as punch. I laughed and I cried until I could laugh and cry no more. Such a release of emotion all orchestrated by God. He created that moment in time, my dog, that fuzzy bunny as well as my cluelessness about that situation.
We think we know our world around us, but it just keeps surprising us. My son had a mouse in his house recently. We told him all the techniques commonly used to trap mice. He went out and bought every mouse trap known to man and baited them with the peanut butter just like we told him. But alas, no luck. He was getting frustrated. Then he noticed that the mouse got into his habanero peppers on his kitchen counter. On a whim, he carefully placed a habanero pepper in the center of the sticky trap and in the middle of the night he was awakened by the sound of that struggling, stuck, habanero-eating mouse that was much bigger and tougher than expected. Peanut butter was for wimps. This was a macho mouse.
So I will begin to try to see the built-in humor, mystery, beauty and wonder in the world my God spoke into being. He is a fascinating God.
