11 Ways to Revive Your Wonder in the World
Daily life is a series of plodding mundanities. We constantly seek the “main drama” of life’s outer fringes, without realizing that we are blind to the true nature of what life is – the extraordinary wonders of the ordinary. Our wonder must constantly be fostered and fought for with gratitude, humility, and hope as we appreciate the gifts of the present, find our satisfaction and joy in God, and look forward to the day of eternity in which our satisfaction and joy will be made complete.
At the end of his life, theologian and writer Clyde Kilby, who largely influenced John Piper at the beginning of his ministry, gave a talk during one of his college classes, during which he summed up eleven resolutions which he used to overcome his struggle against our natural blindness toward the ordinary wonders and gifts of God. 1
I pray they will be a blessing to you, as they were to me:
- At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above me and about me.
- Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.” 2
- I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.
- I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.
- I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.
- I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what [C. S.] Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
- I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”3
- I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music. 4
- I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is just now.
- If for nothing more than the sake of a change of view, I shall assume my ancestry to be from the heavens rather than from the caves.
- Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life in the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega.
Soli Deo Gloria,
1 John Piper, When I Don’t Desire God, 1990
2 Bertrand Russel, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russel, 3 vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 2:159
3 Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass
4 Charles Darwin, cited by Virginia Stem Owens, Seeing Christianity in Red and Green as Well as Black and White: Christianity Today 2, September, 1938