My Sense of Wonder

What a wonderful thing electricity is. Our lives would not be the same without it. It lights our homes, heats them and cools them and keeps our food from spoiling. It heats our water and cooks our food, and performs myriad other tasks for us that we are not even aware of on a daily basis. We don’t have to know how electricity works; we can enjoy all of its benefits without understanding it. Most of the time we take it for granted.

How wonderful our God is. Like electricity, he is all around us, doing things for us that we are not always aware of. “God has done all this, so that we might look for him and reach out and find him. He isn't far from any of us, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are.” (Acts 17:27-28a) Yet it is easy for us to become so familiar with his power and presence and influence in every part of our lives that we begin to take him for granted. God still works miracles – they happen every day and are all around us, but we have become so busy that we have lost the ability to notice them.

Albert Einstein once said, “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.” He expanded on that idea in a longer quotation, “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.” (Denis Brian, Einstein, A Life, New York, 1996, p.234.)

Let us never lose our sense of wonder. Let us never lose our sense of the awesomeness of God. “O Lord, our Lord, your greatness is seen in all the world! Your praise reaches up to the heavens; it is sung by children and babies.” (Psalm 8:1-2a) Children are blessed with a sense of wonder that we all once had, but most of us have somehow lost it as we grew up. Albert Einstein never lost his.

“Lord, help me to take note of the good things you do in me, for me and around me each day. Restore my sense of wonder and open my eyes to see the beauty of your creation. Teach me to love you and praise you every day for your goodness and awesome greatness.”