It's was 8:15 on Sunday morning. I was finishing a glass of
orange juice and bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats while watching the
televised service from a church here in Columbus, GA. The pastor was preaching a message about prayer. Every
few minutes the camera would pan in such a way as to show the faces of band
members and choir members behind him. Occasionally they showed a shot of
the people in the congregation. Here's the dichotomy that struck me.
The preacher is talking about the most amazing, powerful, transcendent
conversation that can happen in all of the cosmos. Yet the faces of
the people around him are blank and bored, betraying that the minds
behind the faces are occupied with a hundred other things of life. I
can somewhat understand the faces as I listen to the sermon of droll
jokes and worn-out cliches. But beyond that, they are the faces of men
and women who have lost the wonder of a conversation with God.
I can relate.
Several days ago I wrote a post called, Tolerance, Taste, and Spirituality in which I express some of the same feelings of boredom which really are the result of a loss of wonder. It's easy to lose that wonder when we reduce our relationship with God down to church attendance, ten or twelve "worship" songs, a purely intellectual pursuit of the Divine, and a political agenda every four years.
A while back Lynn picked up a book from the Library written by Ravi Zacharias called "Recapture the Wonder." I finally picked it up one night, read the introduction, and ended up taking it to bed with me where I found it difficult to put down. In the first chapter he talks about the transition from childhood to adulthood and how much of the enchantment of our childhood vanishes with age. The difficulties of life strip us of any hope in there being anything beautiful, mystical, and transcendent in our existence. Knowledge tends to leave us convinced that most of what we found fabulously mystical as children is, in fact, logically explainable.
Of all places and all peoples on earth where there should be a very real, on-going, experience of that which is mystical and transcendent, should it not be among the people who have been raised to new life by the one who was raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of God in Heaven?" Shouldn't our times together, as those people, be times in which the drab and painful here-and-now is mysteriously swallowed up in the unexplainable, illogical, yet more-than-real life of a Kingdom not of this world?
How do we recapture this wonder, this reality that life as we know it is a mere echo of that which is real life? How do we embrace this life, yet see past the foggy mist of our perceived reality to anchor ourselves in that which is truly real?
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