Last week, our juniors traveled to Washington D.C. as part of the high school’s “Go Week”- a week in which each class goes off together to engage in team building, leadership training, learning experiences, or mission opportunities. I had the privilege of going with the juniors (as you can imagine, to the sheer delight of my junior daughter). I was so grateful and proud of the many, many compliments and comments of wait staff, hotel personnel, flight attendants, and tour guides alike, to the effect that our students were kind to each other, respectful and polite to adults, and engaging in missional living. It was an honor to see our students living life out loud to the glory of God.
The most meaningful part of a very meaningful week occurred at the U.S. Capitol, in the massive rotunda, on an after-hours tour by Representative Louie Gohmert. At his urging, those junior members of our Grace choir gathered together and sang the school doxology, The Lord Bless You and Keep You. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on the front page of the GCS website right now. As they concluded, facing the teary-eyed applause of their parents and classmates, I was filled with an overriding sense of amazement, of wonder at the awesomeness of God: at the way He gave these precious kids beautiful voices; at the wills and spirits He had given them to simply fall into place, without their choir teacher present, and belt it out; at the fact that we had a chance to sing a song of worship of our Lord at the very epicenter of the capital of this nation, a nation that God had raised through the blood and sacrifice of the men and women whose likenesses looked down upon us. What an awesome, amazing God we serve!
When was the last time you were amazed by God? I mean, truly overwhelmed by His greatness to the point that it brought you to tears? In our world, where everything is touted through video and media as the “biggest and best ever!!”, we sometimes forget our sense of amazement. It takes something truly befuddling, like how a plane can seemingly disappear out of thin air in this day of global communications and GPS, to surprise us. And, yet, we live day to day, hour to hour, second to second by the hand of an amazing God.
In Acts, Paul says that, in Him, “we live and move and have our being.” Our God is not a deistic God, who sets the world in motion and then walks away. We exist minute-to-minute because He wills it. The molecules in our body don’t go flying off in 50,000 different directions because, minute-to-minute, He’s saying, “hold together….hold together.” If you’re reading this, your heart has not yet stopped beating because, second-to-second, He’s saying to it, “beat…beat…beat…”, and when He stops saying it, you stop living. What’s even more amazing is, as the men were bringing the hammer down on the nails in His hand, as they were scourging Him and spitting on Him and hurling insults at Him, God was instructing all of their hearts: “beat…beat…beat…”. And, while He’s saying it to my heart and your heart, He’s saying it to hundreds of millions of hearts around the world, and telling the sun to rise and set, the earth to spin on its axis, the ocean tides to go in and out, one star to die and another to be born, commanding things that we’ll never see to grow on the ocean floor, as He’s crafting the personality and spirit of one child in her mom’s womb and comforting the heart of your child who’s having friend problems at school: all of this, together with billions and billions of other things, simultaneously and throughout history. Plus, He still makes time to answer our prayers and listen to our voice the second we cry out to Him.
What an awesome, majestic, mighty God we serve! Meanwhile, most of the time, we’re thinking about which pair of socks to wear, or dwelling on that little comment, probably innocuous, that person made about us yesterday.
It’s not that the mundane doesn’t have meaning, it’s just that we lose so much of the beauty and dignity and value and grace and goodness of life if that’s all we see. More importantly, we miss great opportunities to lead our kids to look beyond their current circumstances and see a mighty, sovereign Lord who has them right in the palm of His hand, protecting them and guiding them every second of every day. We miss leading them into worship of His awesome nature, and into an appreciation and enjoyment of life that really is possible, and is, in fact, our birthright in Christ.
All it really takes is opening our eyes, empowered by the Holy Spirit. Then, sharing with our kids what we see. It’s all out there; opportunities to be amazed by God.
Leave a Reply