Waking to Wonder
Grace in Small Interruptions
At 6:30 a.m., I scoured my backyard for my son’s missing basketball shoe. One of his friends had hidden it as a prank.
We had torn through every corner of the house the night before. In the quiet of morning, with daylight finally helping me, I stepped out back — grumbling about losing a shoe before the season even started.
Then I looked up.
Eyes Up
Above me, a November sunrise glowed orange and pink as our oaks reached over the yard, auburn and bronze leaves fluttering down to speckle the grass. I noticed the contrast between the neighbor’s golden Ginkgo and a massive oak crowned in brick-red foliage.
In that light, I thought of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, where he paints Malacandra’s beauty through Dr. Ransom’s first astonished impression of the planet:
“…with the first unearthly strangeness of the bright, still, sparkling, unintelligible landscape — with needling shapes of pale green, thousands of feet high, with sheets of dazzling blue soda-water…” (Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 7)
If only we could wake up each morning as if we had just landed on Earth — and see the world each day as a child.
Through Her Eyes
When my daughter Elizabeth was a baby, my wife Kristy and I would take her on walks around our suburban neighborhood. It was July — the trees formed a dense cathedral of green.
Lying flat in her stroller, little Elizabeth’s green eyes scanned the sky, absorbing every color and shape in the branches and leaves of the trees towering above her.
Her curiosity lifted my gaze and made me wonder what she could see that I no longer see.
That same nudge to look up returned — I stopped to give thanks.
Small Thorn, Greater Grace
God, thank you for catching my eye with your morning glory.
Thank you for lifting my perspective up to the heavens — above the morning’s frustration.
Thank you for reminding me of those past walks with my infant daughter and my wife. Those memories led me to take a walk with teenage Elizabeth this morning — one more chance to see the trees in full color before tomorrow’s snow blankets the neighborhood.
We found my son’s shoe later that day — in the front bushes, a foot from our porch.
God, thank you for the thorn — the shoe hunt that led me beyond the front door and into your grace.
Sharing Midwestern values through the stories of a hard-working single dad, all for the glory of God.