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Practicing Awe: Delight

September 1, 2025 by gobeyond12

I know it has been a few months since the last post on this topic.  Hoping to get back in the flow again!

The other day I was at the doctor’s office for a routine checkup.  When they had finished poking and prodding and telling me all the same stuff, I got in the checkout line.  When my turn came up, I saw that sitting on the counter was a little jar of Dum Dum lollipops.  Apparently, I forgot that one is supposed to grow out of eating lollipops, so I said to the nurse, “Ooooo!  Can I have one?”  She turned her face from the computer screen and her mouth said “yes” while her eyes said “you DO know those are for children, don’t you?”  I was unrepentant, and left the office happily crunching a cherry lollipop. 

The experience left me pondering.  Cherry lollipops are on the low end of the delight scale, but why not?  Why not enjoy the small pleasures?  Why does growing up often mean “growing out of”?  I realize that some things we grow out of because we grow into the reality.  Women don’t play dress-up because they actually wear the fancy clothes and shoes.  Men don’t play with trucks in the sand because they now drive them.  But it seems that somewhere in the journey of life we lose our connection to many of the delights of our childhood experiences. 

The emotion of delight in itself is in the moment – an emotional captivation.  Children often experience it in an unclouded form.  No worries or stresses or limitations on their emotional engagement in the event, however fleeting it may be.  For them, repetition is glorious.  “Do it again, Daddy!” the child says after being swung around in a circle.  In this regard, we, as adults are less capable than children.  We tire of repetition.  It is far more common for the adult to beg off the game than it is for the child to ask to stop! 

It is growing our capacity for delight that I believe is a goal worth pursuing.

In our adulthood, I believe that we have to chose to be in the moment when the emotion of delight most naturally occurs.  To be free and willing to be caught up in the pleasure of a sunset, the cool air in the morning, the company of a dear friend, the exquisite architecture of a building, the taste of a really good burger.  Can we rejoice in a repeat?  Every morning?  Every evening?  Every day when we see the same trees and flowers, still healthy and flourishing?   Whether the experience is simple or complex, the question is if we can clear the fog enough to engage. 

For a child, the experience more or less ends in itself.  The soul and spirit haven’t developed enough yet to direct the emotion into another sphere.  THIS is where I believe adults can take their delights to a level far more sophisticated.  It can take us somewhere else.  It can become a path to wonderment, curiosity, gratitude, and eventually, awe.  Our souls are far more developed in their capacity to expand the experience of a moment into something bigger.  A connection with God.  I delight in seeing the hummingbirds come back to my yard.  What can I do with that emotion now?  It is an enjoyable moment and leaves me feeling uplifted, but what if it becomes a gift to God?  What if I take that delight now and ponder the beauty of what He made, the timing of the encounter, the special “hug” that it is to me because of my love of birds?  Now the delight has come full circle.  It has returned to the One who made it. 

I would encourage you to ask yourself some questions.  What has God made you to delight in?  You may not give a fig for cherry lollipops.  Or maybe when your child took one, you always wished you could too, but didn’t.  What have you stopped delighting in because you were “supposed” to grow out of it?  Does the pain and cynicism of life block you from engaging in the emotional starting point of the moment?  Are you too busy and too burdened to stop and enjoy?  Could some healing and restoration happen so that you can delight in the things He made you to delight in again, whether simple or profound?    

Delight can lead you to awe.    

Have that cherry lollipop.  And then talk to God about it.            

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Practicing Awe: Gratitude

April 21, 2025 by gobeyond12

“Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.  I may express this other feeling of cosmic coziness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence.  Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea; the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck … It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything – the coalscuttle or the bookcase – and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island.  But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hairbreadth escape:  everything has been saved from a wreck.  Every man has had one horrible adventure – as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light.  Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius, and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been.  To me, it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great-Might-Not-Have-Been.” – GK Chesterton, excerpt from Orthodoxy

We have been taught much about the importance of an “attitude of gratitude” and seen much of how a spirit of ingratitude and entitlement destroys a culture.   So, many of us already go through our daily lives and count the things we can be grateful for.  But I have also been pondering how deep that gratitude actually goes.  We thank the Lord for this or that intervention, gift, or experience; but have we really wrapped our minds around how precarious it all is?  Like Crusoe, flung upon an island, counting every single scrap that washes ashore as a boon from heaven?  It very well might have washed out to sea, never to be seen again. 

For God, the cosmos is a playground.  For us, it is a wild and unpredictable frontier.  We like to believe we have control, but we really have very little, if any.  Gratitude forces us to face that reality head on – we must admit that someone or something else is at the back of it all. Do we have the courage to look at our lives through the lens of deep and astonished gratitude at the miracle of Having Been? 

Do we have permission to ponder the depth of God’s intention in making us?  David describes this level of gratitude magnificently in Psalm 139.  CS Lewis puts another spin on it when talking about the perspective of the angels. 

“To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.”  From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.” – CS Lewis, excerpt from That Hideous Strength

God limited Himself to a finite expression when He made the universe and countless billions of times in human history.  Every time He makes a person.  When He made me.  When He made you.  He chooses to take from the eternity of His essence and spin out of it a uniquely finite creation.  You. 

I ponder the immensity of God who is vast beyond all our comprehension, choosing to leave the realm of infinite imaginative possibilities and just make one thing.  Many of us know what it is like to dwell in that fabulous realm of “what could be”.  Everything works out the way it is supposed to there.  I can’t even imagine what that realm must be like to God.  Perfect though He is in execution, He still has to narrow Himself down to one expressed reality.  And He chooses to do that over and over again. 

A new kind of gratitude I hadn’t savored before.       

I see our gratitude as a path to a destination.  Whether for the small daily hugs or the vast cosmic miracle of creation, it is a means to an end.  It is crucial to our well-being because it leads us somewhere outside of ourselves. 

I believe that is why gratitude is a fundamental building block for practicing awe.  It is meant to lead us to God with a heart that is ripe for worship.  So many flavors of awe can flow from the foundation of gratitude.

So, how can we practice it more?  I would encourage you to look at your life and determine if gratitude flows easily, and if it does, where.  Is it in the small, daily things?  Is it in the cosmic wonder of the journey?  What if you were to expand it into a place where it doesn’t already exist?  How can you make the range of your gratitude more robust?  Just practicing what comes easily doesn’t grow us.  I think it is will worth our while to invite God to show us where we could expand our capacity for gratitude – where does it matter to Him that we are not already expressing it?  What do we constantly miss, whether it be simple or profound?   

Let’s each explore with Him how we can anchor this foundational building block deep, strong, and wide. 

Posted in Practicing Awe | 1 Comment »

Practicing Awe: Reverence

February 9, 2025 by gobeyond12

Awe is a transcendent emotional experience.  It’s an intense jumble of emotions we normally don’t find all in one place – wonder, joy, fear, surprise, and sometimes horror.  At the core of it is a realization that something is far bigger and more powerful than we are.  I emphatically believe that it was designed by God to function as a core element of worship.  As such, our capacity for awe experiences can grow.  But how? 

I would like to begin by breaking the concept of awe into six building blocks.  I am not saying they are the only components, but I believe they are important ones.  By breaking it down, we can examine each area and see where we can grow. 

The first one is reverence.

I love this definition: “profound, adoring, awed respect”. 

Reverence is by far the most familiar of the six building blocks we will explore.  But we cannot underestimate its importance, nor can we ignore the relentless pursuit of the culture to destroy any and all forms of respect.  This is a concerted assault by the devil to destroy a pillar that supports our position before God and the grandeur of all He has made.  If the only thing we know how to do is belittle, tear down, and destroy, we have lost a fundamental part of our birthright as creatures made in the image of God.

It is not just in the culture that we must fight against the tide of irreverence.  In the church, we find the religious spirit.  It wages war against reverence by turning God into a formula to be followed for a predetermined result. There is not much about a formula that commands reverence.  A relationship with a living God who acts in ways that are beyond our understanding and control is the beautiful and truly awe-inspiring position we are meant to occupy. 

So, what can we do? 

The first is simply to raise our awareness.  We can ask God to shine His light and show us what we need to see in the culture, in our communities, in our churches, and our own lives.  Where have we been lulled into a cavalier attitude by the culture?  Where have we joined the “spitters” without realizing it?  What can we do in thought, prayer, and action to come in the opposite spirit? 

A second piece is to ask God what matters to Him.  Is there some area of our lives where He longs to see us express reverence and we aren’t?  What is on His heart? 

Another area to look at is design.  What facets of the nature of God stir you to reverence? 

An example for me is the very first phrase of the Bible – “In the beginning, God”.  There are so many emotions evoked with that one statement about God’s relationship to time and creation, and that He is the motive force behind it all.  Another example is from Psalm 139.  The God who knows me intimately.  Amazing, astounding, wonderful, beyond my understanding, and profoundly unsettling.  A source of reverential respect. 

Reverence can be expanded from things we have learned or developed, but it can also flow freely from the springs of our design. 

God made YOU to reverence Him in certain ways.  Do you know what those ways are?  That is a flow you can easily deepen and widen.

We can soak in the Scriptures that express reverence to God.  Perhaps you could begin with a playlist of those that really resonate with you.  Then build out to some that are not as sparkly, but could expand your capacity for reverence in a new area. 

And there may be symbols or acts of reverence that could become part of your lifestyle.  Sometimes it is something as simple as taking a few minutes to settle your mind or emotions and get oriented before your time with God.  Most of us live from one hectic transition to the next.  Just the discipline of moving into a mindset of reverence before engaging with God would be valuable.

Think about what might represent an act of reverence to you.  It could be a symbol of something – a special arrangement on a table, or a room that is set aside, something you wear that is meaningful, or a way that you prepare food.  The objective is not to get some particular result out of the process.  This is not a formula.  It is a way of outwardly expressing the reverence that you feel about who God is and how He has interacted with your life. 

I would encourage you to find ways to begin intentionally growing your base for reverence over the next couple of weeks, and in the next blog we will explore the second building block of wonderment. 

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Celebrating the Congruence of Jesus

November 7, 2020 by gobeyond12

I have recently gotten hooked on the TV series starring the “little Belgian detective” Hercule Poirot, played by David Suchet.  It was a long running series in the UK that eventually made it to the US, and is loved by millions.  Surprisingly, I have not read a single Agatha Christie book, even though I love detective stories, particularly those written by British authors.  It’s unusual for me to love the movie before the book, but there is a first for everything.    

While the stories themselves are masterfully written, what has attracted me the most is the person of Poirot.  David Suchet brilliantly portrays a character that captures the heart and mind, consistently, episode after episode.  Whether or not you find Poirot endearing or irritating at any one moment, you will always find him being himself.  That is what captivated me the most. 

In recent months I have been pondering my craving for congruence.  I think it has been a deep driving force behind much of my healing journey.  And when I see a glimpse of it in some facet of life around me, my spirit thrills.  In the character of Poirot, David Suchet achieves congruence in human form – one of the magical effects of the creative arts. We can achieve something that is so hard to attain in real life.  Purity of expression.  And even in the creative arts, it is rare to see it done so well and for so many years. 

But the other day I was faced again with the limitations of our humanity.  Some of the later shows are darker than the earlier versions, particularly their rendition of “Murder on the Orient Express”.  It was like a dash of cold water in the face.  The level at which I had to remind myself that it is all just a story serves to emphasize the depth at which I, and many others I am quite sure, long for eternal consistency.

I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about all of these things, when my thoughts turned to Jesus Christ.  I know that He was sinless and perfect.  But what did that really mean to me?  Up until the moment, it mostly meant that He never did a moral wrong.   He was tested, but never failed.  But in the context of the things I was pondering, the picture expanded into a realm I had not fully comprehended.  Jesus was not only sinless, He was infinitely, perfectly, utterly congruent, throughout His entire lifetime.    

While we, as His followers, may endeavor to live righteously, our existence is perpetually clouded by some pain, some dark secret, some unholy alliance between ourselves and the darkness.  We don’t process our pain well and it leaves a stain behind.  We are unbelieving and unfaithful.  Lies live quietly inside of us, distorting our visage.  We may not be doing moral wrong, but we aren’t pure.  Our essence shines forth in rays of blinding light from time to time.  Jesus was the Light, all the time. 

We have to accept the reality of our own fallen nature, though there is a part of me that will always grieve the letdown.  In the real world outside of beloved fictional characters, the tendency to emulate has been a dangerous one.  But now, I see it through a different lens.  I can celebrate the clearing of the clouds when it happens in the human realm around me, and even, in myself.  But my ultimate joy is in the only human who has ever walked and ever will walk this earth in complete congruence, the Son of God.       

Posted in General | 7 Comments »

The Significance of an Orange

April 15, 2020 by gobeyond12

Back in the pioneer days, oranges were a rare treat.  I remember reading in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories how they would be overjoyed if they got a single orange in their stocking for Christmas.  It was hard for me to imagine what that was like.  In my lifetime, oranges have been only a grocery store away.  Every week I buy a bag of big juicy navel oranges and eat them most days with my breakfast.

But I have never enjoyed them as much as I have in the last month.  They may be commonly available in our day and age, but that doesn’t make them any less of a treat.  For me, they have become a daily reminder of the power of gratitude. 

I know that gratitude is a topic that most of us have heard taught on, preached on, expounded on, lectured on, or any other kind of verbal spouting you can imagine – probably more times than we can count.   And, at the end of the day, it’s probably not a bad thing.  It’s an incredibly important topic that we have a tendency to forget, especially when we are hurting. 

But there are a couple of angles to gratitude that may not be explored quite so often and that is what I want to talk about here.   I think that they are directly related to our emotional grounding. 

The first is that it causes us to recognize value.   Looking at the world through grateful eyes causes us to see value around us.  Why am I grateful for the orange?  Because I appreciate its intrinsic value.  It tastes good.  It’s refreshing.  It’s healthy.  Why am I grateful for the flowers that are coming up in my garden?  I value their beauty.  Why am I grateful for the car I drive around town?  Because I value its functionality, and yes, its speed and good looks too. Why am I grateful for the people I love? Too many reasons to count. When we practice being grateful – when we look around and say, “What am I grateful for, or what can I be grateful for?” we are practicing the art of finding value.  THAT is a powerful tool in our emotional grounding. 

In the last blog, I explored the process of finding purpose in powerlessness as a way to prevent feelings of futility.  This is another facet of the same idea.  When we are tried by all that is going wrong, we can find some emotional stability in the discovery of value.  It is most effective when we can find it in the situation itself – such as the purpose of the trial.  But we have to learn how to think that way first.  Those pathways in our brain need to exist before we get to the situation that will try them.  Otherwise, we will be far more inclined to focus on the pain, the wrong, the hurt.  How can you build those pathways in advance?  One way is through gratitude.  Find and appreciate the value in life around you every day, all the time.   Then, when the hard times come, you will have an onramp to finding the value that God has wrapped in the package of pain. 

Another facet of gratitude is that it reminds us of the transitory nature of our lives.  I know.  How does THAT help with emotional grounding?  Words like “transitory”, “temporary”, “fleeting”, are not particularly helpful when we are already feeling unstable.  But in reality, to strengthen ourselves, we need to disrupt our human tendency to depend on life’s continuity.  We have to find our anchor in the nature of God alone – His continuity is the only thing that is truly dependable.  The disturbance of things we never considered disturbable can cause us the most turmoil. 

On New Year’s Day, 2020, did anyone imagine that by March, all kids would be doing school from home for the rest of the school year?  Or that nearly every dine-in restaurant in America would be closed?  Or huge festivals and sporting events shut down?  I doubt it!  These are things that click by without us giving them a second thought. 

Gratitude reminds us in a thousand small ways that it is not a guarantee that we will have access to the things we value forever.   It builds in us, in the context of appreciation of the gifts of God, a durability against changes in our world.  The shock of violent change is mitigated by the regular, conscious choice to recognize the uncertainty of life.    

I am grateful for the orange I am eating today because I see value in it and maybe, I won’t get to eat an orange tomorrow.  I’d like to, but who knows if tomorrow will be what I expect it to be.  So, thank you, God, for my orange today.

Let me tell you, this is not a practice that I particularly enjoy.  As a Mercy, I want stability.  My hard wiring is to create an ecosystem and DRIVE IT INTO THE BEDROCK, thank you very much.  Gratitude as an act of worship and appreciation of the value around me, yes, definitely.  Gratitude as a reminder of the uncertainty of life, not so much.  But I think it is an important exercise.  I think that we practice a dangerous game of brinkmanship by allowing ourselves to mindlessly expect things to be a certain way all the time.  Those are pathways that are being built too.  That’s a way of thinking and directing our emotions, even if we don’t realize it.  And those pathways aren’t going to help you or me very much when the world turns upside down. 

But if we practice remembering that we really don’t know what might change in a moment’s notice …   

Anything could change. 

Except the nature of God. 

Thank you, Lord, for the orange I ate today, for I don’t know if I will have one tomorrow.     

Posted in Grounding | 6 Comments »

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