Lost In Wonder

When was the last time you were amazed by God? 

I mean really and truly amazed? 

Perhaps your God has become too safe, too comfortable, too easy. Dare I even say, too familiar? 

I pause by the side of a trail to notice the bed of moss shimmering in the afternoon sunshine, casting a certain silvery tone to the edge of the path. I snap a picture, but no photo can capture what I see, what I feel in this moment. I am lost in wonder. 

Amid the moss, I notice a small spruce tree... green-life just beginning. As the crisp air reminds me even this little tree will soon be covered in a blanket of white, it's a sign that life is still trying to push through. Come Spring-time, this tree will have grown even as frost-cold buries it. And so might my heart expand too in Winter's chill. 

Cease to be surprised by God, and life becomes too ordinary. Too mundane. Too predictable. 

And God becomes too normal. 

One must continue to be in awe of God or they will lose their thanks. 

Raising eyes from moss-bed to majestic mountains, I'm struck by the contrast. That God is the God of both the small and the big. That nothing He has made escapes His all-knowing eye, including me. That all things great and little that concern my life are constantly under His loving gaze. There is not a moment that I am not in His thoughts or His view. 

And I confess in my soul that, often, I forget. 

I forget His love and thus cease to praise. 

I forget His care and thus cease to be grateful. 

Rather, I find myself ranting at Him for all the reasons why He has supposedly failed me instead of counting the ways He's never ceased to come through. The focus becomes too myopic, and I fall into a sea of self-pity when I should be collapsing into an ocean of endless grace. 

The created world of God convicts me of my thanklessness. My ingratitude. My lack of perspective. 

God becomes too human when He has become too small in our eyes.

Forget His awesomeness, forget His grandeur, forget His greatness, and you forget Him altogether. 

Oh, selfish heart, do you not know that He who made and holds this wide world together made and holds you? Are you so fixed on all that is not right that you have lost the sense of how much is right because He is nothing but right? 

Turn your eyes to the hills as did David and let yourself breathe in everlasting help. Eternal hope. 

Your assistance comes from God who created all this majesty. Who is majesty Himself. 

For all the ways you think you have been abandoned and deserted by your God, He has not left you, and you are still safe. The winds may howl and the waves may seem high, but His hand will keep you. Forever. Always. 

I preach it to my unbelieving heart. Ask God to make it real to me. And, in taking in this detailed whole, I am, with the hymn-writer, "lost in wonder, love, and praise."