Waking to Wonder
Grace in Small Interruptions
At 6:30 a.m., I scoured the backyard for my son’s missing basketball shoe, hidden by a knucklehead friend as a prank.
We had torn through every corner of the house the night before. In the quiet of morning, with daylight finally helping, I stepped out back — grumbling about losing a shoe before the season even started.
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. The neighbor’s golden Ginkgo stood beside 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 astonished first 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 used to take her for walks around our suburban neighborhood.
On those summer evenings, the quiet streets were roofed in leaves — a cathedral of green filtering the day’s last light.
Lying flat in her stroller, Elizabeth’s green eyes tracked the canopy, taking in the colors and shapes etched in the branches overhead.
Her curiosity lifted my gaze and made me wonder what she could see that I no longer saw.
This week, that same nudge to look up had 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.
Those memories led me to take a morning walk with Elizabeth, now a teenager — some special one-on-one time to admire 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 missing shoe that led me out the door and back into wonder.
Sharing Midwestern stories of faith, family, work, and sports
This is lovely, Ray. We all need to be awakened to the wonder of the world, and sometimes the first step to take toward that end is to simply look up.