Every moment of every day is significant. The world is more than the sum of its parts. Let every day strike you with child-like wonder, for the creation is a wonder, and the Creator is the Wonder of wonders. 

Miracles and Mundanity

What do the Northern Lights, ants, and the miracle of birth have to do with one another? Today, I will endeavor to share with you a way of seeing the world that will cause you to understand the significance and connection between these three incongruent creations.

Another question, one which I ask you to take time to reflect on: When was the last time you were struck with wonder? I mean truly dumbfounded at how amazing something was. Has it been days, months, years? Can you not even remember? As children, the novelty of creation and the many characters therein would nearly take our breath away. From the first snow of the winter, to the rolly polly on the sidewalk, to the giraffe at the zoo, all of these things stopped us dead in our tracks and caused us to utter various forms of, “Wow!” For most adults, these things now cause nothing more than a quick acknowledgement of their existence. They all are just so…normal. So what happened?

Materialism

Post-Elightenment, as the Western World moved toward modernity, men began to see the world less as a land of glories and more as a sea of well-ordered atoms. Everything lost its gleam, and color faded to gray. We found ways to write off every phenomenon and remove any meaning from them. Lightning became mere static electricity. Stars became floating clouds of burning gas. Mountains became conglomerations of various metals and minerals. Fetuses became clumps of cells.

While these are all true facts to varying degrees, Digory astutely observed in The Magician’sNephew, “Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.” (The Magician’sNephew 10). Materialism sucked the life out of living. Not only did the secular crowd fall into the dreary grips of this world-view, but Christians, too, have unknowingly swallowed the same poison. Brian Sauve and Ben Garrett of the Haunted Cosmos podcast often remark, “The world isn’t just stuff.” I agree with this simple statement. There are many glories, dispersed and interwoven throughout creation and the fullness thereof. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2 LSB). Let us return to a few of those glories.

Illumination, Insects, and Infants

The Aurora Borealis. Photons from the nuclear reactor at the center of our solar system, which is 93 million miles away and 1.3 million times the size of Earth, interact in such a way with our atmosphere that lights shimmer down upon us like spindles which burst forth from a jewel. These lights dance to and fro, gracing the sky and reaching out to the stars above and the ground below. Their beauty causes the world to stop and demand our attention, lifting us into the heavens for a moment, carrying us into the expanse of space.

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