The gift of wonder

Jesus said we must become like children to see the kingdom of God.

The other night I was sitting up late with my son, Luc, watching an old Mr. Rogers video. Luc, who is five, watched carefully and intensely as Mr. Rogers visited a dinosaur exhibit a museum and had someone show him how to run a back hoe.

It is one of the great pains of our parenting for Lisa and I that Luc is nonverbal. We do not know what he is thinking much of the time and he cannot tell us. But his eyes spoke of wonder as he watched Mr. Rogers look up at the jaws of an towering meat-eating dinosaur.

How quickly do we lose that sense of wonder?

And how can we ever adopt a proper attitude toward God without it? How can we grasp the terrible beauty of grace if we have lost the ability to look at our world and our lives in awe and wonder.

If instead we live as if we deserve the next breath of air we are about to breathe – that the world owes us – then we cannot receive it as a gift. If we do not feel from each moment the miracle of our own life, then how easy is it to see where our hopes and desires are not met and feel bitter disappointment?

If life is not wonderful and beautiful, then how easy is it to suppose God has let us down.

A hummingbird buzzed across my patio, and I stopped what I was doing. Who knows what wonder might come next in a world where such a creature as this visits us when we are preparing to grill out hamburgers for dinner.