It is a shame that we do not remember being infants. Think of the joy of remembering our first steps or forming our first real word or sentence that made sense. I would love to feel that astonishment and joy. Or to discover little things for the first time that we take for granted today like what dirt feels like, or what a dog looks like, or a plane flying.
I first thought of this about a year ago when a friend's child was first learning to talk. I was holding him and he looked at the sky and suddenly got really excited shrieking "plane! plane!' And I couldn't understand at first why he was so excited. I wrote my thoughts down on a post it note and re-discovered it last night and it holds just as much for me today as it did then. I began to think that part of our problem today is that we are no longer amazed by much in the world around us.
Our faith can be like that sometimes and we get further and further from our date of salvation we can often forget what it was like to be truly lost and then to learn bit by bit who God was and how forgiven we are.
Or speaking to the non-believer (some believers too): we become so enmeshed into our world that we no longer have the chance to step back and be surprised. Everything that we want explained has either been explained by someone or dumbed down for us so we don't have to spend much time thinking about anything. But I would confess that very little has been explained. Take for example your elbow. Most people can bend it back and forth without much effort. It takes little thought and the movement is so fluid that it seems to just happen. Now some scientist out there could discuss the firing of neural synapses that leads to muscle contraction which allows for the bone to rotate. But how did those unrelated things become connected? How did we suddenly know how to bend our elbow? Why, with all the technology that we have today, has that fluid movement not been replicated in a non-biological creation or even those biological manifestations that humans have made? Think about it a bit and then ask is there another answer. Is there a God who encourages us not to take a simple answer but to ask questions and in return, sometimes be left with no answer but just amazement?
Today, go out and re-capture your infancy. Look at the world in new ways and ask "why" and "how." But most of all, allow the thought that you might never know. Go and be amazed again.
