“We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground” (Brennan Manning).
” . . . [A]lmost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to . . . . [O]nly a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement” (from Joe Vs. The Volcano).
Very few things in my life are cause for astonishment anymore. I don’t necessarily consider myself overly cynical, but I have experienced a lot in my lifetime, so not much is new to me.
I miss the part of being a child where so many things astonished me, to when the world was a far more magical and mystical place.
Maybe the one thing that should never lose its wonder for me is the grace of God. The fact that I wake up every morning to a new dose of grace still astonishes me. In fact, the more I see of myself, the more I learn what I am deep down apart from the grace of God, I am amazed that such a thing as grace still exists for me.
Also, perhaps what could serve to draw people to this great God we serve is when people see us living in a constant state of total amazement over God’s love for us. It won’t happen when we focus on following rules and being moral. It will happen when we finally confess our complete and total dependence on God and His grace and fall at His feet in an act of utter surrender.
When you see that life and everything in it is grace, you truly begin to see each new day not as an entitlement or a reward but as a completely undeserved gift (which is what grace is) that comes not to those who’ve earned it but to those who realize that they deserve nothing but death and hell apart from God.
So, thank you, God, for this life, and forgive me if I don’t love it enough. Forgive me if I don’t thank You enough for it and live amazed by it.
Amen.
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