Beyond the Horizon

All six of the building blocks are important for increasing our capacity for awe, but I believe that wonderment plays a key role in our creativity and to some extent, our sanity. 

Wonderment helps us access things beyond what we already understand and even opens our eyes to new views of the familiar.  It gives God every opportunity to crack the door or show us a peek behind the curtain.  The emotion of wonderment leads quickly to questions such as “What if?” or “Could I?” or “Can you imagine?” 

In the garden, God gave Adam and Eve a place to start and a whole lot of principles woven into the universe.  Many things had been made, but not everything had been revealed.  It was like a parent dumping a whole tub of Legos® on the floor, and then standing back and waiting to see what the children would create with them.  He built in them, from the beginning, the ability to do what He did – take a picture from His imagination and make it real. 

Not much has changed for us.  An infinite God has equally infinite expressions of creativity.  We still have Legos strewn on the ground all around us, and still many things have been made, but not all has been revealed. 

But we all know what it is like to try and create in a locked down, limited, task focused mindset or environment.  Creativity thrives when we are free to wonder, to see possibilities, to look at things from an entirely different angle, to get excited again, to see the beauty and the potential.  To be reminded that even something as seemingly commonplace as a chicken laying an egg was once an original act of creativity.  It didn’t have to happen that way.  Chickens laying eggs wasn’t the only possible option.  Our education generally doesn’t set the stage for infinite possibilities – it just tells us what is.  How extraordinary it would be if we could reconnect with the child we were before comfortable assumptions took the place of the unexplainable. 

I think this has a huge impact on our sense of fulfillment.  We were made in God’s image and I think one of the greatest expressions of that is being creators.  It may be tangible; it may be invisible.  But something is meant to flow from you that the world has never seen.  And when you find that “why”, you will strike close to the core of your whole being.  We aren’t copy machines.  We are each one of us unique individuals, meant to create some context in which the world sees a new facet of God. 

Even more fundamentally, I believe a sense of wonderment helps protect our mind and our sanity.  The very act of wonder embodies a sense of something bigger, something great that transcends us.  We are putting ourselves in the vulnerable position of being surprised, taken off guard, educated, stretched, and possibly overwhelmed.  It resets our sense of proportion, which has a sneaking tendency to make us the center of the universe.  We need to be reminded that the only final answer is an incomprehensible One. 

And we don’t try to fit into our minds something they were never meant to hold.  God can never be fully explained.  Whether secular humanist or Bible believing Christian, our finite minds are the same.  The box we are trying to fit Him into is most commonly made from walls of pain, but saint or sinner, our minds are equally finite.  It can’t be done.  Something so large cannot fit into a tiny container without shattering it to pieces.  If we lose our wonderment, we can lose our reason too. 

So, what would happen if wonderment became an active practice for us?  How would we see God and the world differently?  How would our minds heal and our spirits breathe?  What if we look around us and see expressions of creation as an original act of creativity – a choice in the mind of a God who could have done it any way He chose?  What would it do to us if we could really engage with the inexhaustible creativity of God?  How would it change our sense of expectation in our own lives?  What would happen to the flow of creativity through us? 

Next, we will explore some ideas for the HOW.