Warning: This one's a bit deeper than I normal.
I wasn't planning on blogging this weekend. After being out of town for a week and then the crazy week I've had with the van servicing, rescheduling photo sessions, just trying to get back into the swing of things, etc..and preparing for a baby shower I'm hosting tomorrow, I had planned to wait until Sunday night or Monday to blog. I decided to read a little before bed and was so inspired I had to share.
I'm reading Donald Miller's latest book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I'm only 59 pages in, but wow! Let me share a bit of what I just read tripped something in my mind.
"We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren't capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on……The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it…….
When Steve, Ben and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beautify of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you……
I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants." — exerted from pg. 58 -59 of A Millions Miles in a Thousand Years.
Does this speak to anyone else like it did me?
I admit I am spoiled. My needs are met and I have many of my wants. But over the past year or so God has been teaching me a couple of things.
One of those things is to just to slow down and be in awe. I wonder if we don't miss some of the most awe inspiring things in life because we aren't looking. Because we're too busy to slow down and see all the incredible aspects of life. There are so many awe inspiring things right in front of our noses if we just pay attention. Experiences that seem so very ordinary yet if we let them will inspire us with awe, inspire us with just how extraordinary this life is.
A couple of nights ago I took dinner to friends who just had a baby. Their almost 3 year old comes running as I enter the door almost squealing "We have a baby! We have a baby!" Her excitement over her beautiful baby sister has made me smile so many times over the past 2 days.
A few other things that have had me standing in awe lately: the above newborn baby sister's smiling in her sleep, the blue of the Autumn sky, hugs from my kiddo, the streaked sky at sunset, the exploring of the precious 16 month old girl I photographed this week, the amazing granite rock boulders of Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia (photos to come very soon), and so many more.
God is teaching me to also just slow down and be grateful. This is a tough one for me. Not because I'm not grateful, but because life gets so busy as a wife, mom, etc that I have to consciously slow my mind down and remind myself to be grateful. When I do take the time it always brings me back to awe and amazement. Then there are moments that I'm just overwhelmed with gratefulness. I want to have a spirit of gratitude. I have a lot of work still left to do in that respect, but I'm trying.
What about you? Do you need to remind yourself to slow down and be in awe? Or slow down and be grateful? What has inspired awe for you lately? What has caused you to become overwhelmed with gratitude recently?
