gripped by wonder: Fuel for the soul

This is week six in our series on what Scripture teaches us about the value of wonder in our lives and ministries.
 
Today’s Scripture passage is Luke 5:26 (NLT)

Everyone was gripped with great wonder and awe, and they praised God, exclaiming, “We have seen amazing things today!

This verse comes from the passage where Jesus was preaching to a room so crowded that the only way a group of men could get their paralyzed friend to Jesus for healing was to go up on the roof and lower their friend down into the middle of the crowd. Jesus then forgave the man’s sins and healed him. This verse, Luke 5:26, was the crowd’s response to what they had just seen.

They weren’t just quietly wondering. They were “gripped” with “great wonder and awe.” When was the last time that you were gripped with wonder and awe over something that God had done? That word “gripped” gives me a picture of wonder and awe closing in all around me, surrounding me, and making it impossible to ignore. When was the last time that you simply couldn’t ignore the wonder of God in a moment?

If it’s been awhile, is it because God doesn’t do wonderful and amazing things that often anymore or is because we’re just failing to be gripped? I fear that it’s become far to easy for us to evade this grip of wonder and awe. We’re busy and move right past it without looking or giving it time to grip us. We’re so focused on other things we miss the moments entirely, or maybe we’ve just come to expect those moments and take them for granted.

Maybe we need to slow down just a bit so we don’t miss or just brush past these opportunities to be gripped with wonder. You may be saying, “That sounds great, but you don’t know my schedules, the demands and responsibilities I have. I don’t have time to slow down.” Do you have time not to? If it’s been a while since you’ve been “gripped with great wonder and awe,” then I would wonder how your soul is doing? I know when I get caught in seasons that are so busy or stressful that I stop noticing the wonderful and amazing things that God is doing around me, whether I want to admit it or not, I feel it in my soul. Instead of wonder and awe and praise filling me, I find myself struggling with discouragement or discontent or envy or bitterness or even anger.

So I ask again, do we really have time not to slow down and take notice of the wonders that God is doing around us? In difficult times, it might start out with looking for the small everyday things that we have been missing: a sunrise, a sunset, a flower, a interesting cloud formation, something or anything that reminds us that God is good and still pretty amazing. It also might start with going back to John 3:16, Romans 5:8, or another favorite verse that reminds us how much God loves us and how truly wonderful He has been to us.

I would challenge you, and me, this week to start opening our eyes to the wonders around us and then respond as this crowd did by praising God and exclaiming to ourselves and others that “We have seen amazing things today!”