It is an act of courage to get up every morning and to face each day that we are given. We get up and we step out our door into our life which feel we control. We have a well ordered commute to work, we have regulated and mastered the environment of the car we drive, we know where all the usual traffic hang ups and pot holes are, we even can predict what music will play on our favorite radio station. It is only when something happens that is unpredictable that we get jarred out of our world of complacency, and into the world of grace. All of a sudden we go to step from one stone to the next while crossing the river of life, and our feet are taken out from under us. We do not like the bumps on the head and the gushing wounds that come from miss-stepping and falling.We have a dislike and a distrust of anything that causes us to fear. Our monkey mind goes into full survival mode when we are in fear. This has served us well biologically speaking. We know when something causes our hearts to race and our mind to sharpen that it is for good reason, and we usually obey that biological cocktail that is telling us to get-the-hell out of here. This is all well and good, but it has done us no good spiritually. We were never meant to live in fear, but nor were we meant to live in dull and insipid complacency either.
Psalms 104 is quickly becoming one of my favorite passages of scripture. The verses are clear, the breadth of the pros is immense, and it all comes back to summation with "Praise the LORD, my soul. Praise the LORD." (NIV Psalm 104:35) The entire chapter is about wonder, and the immensity of what God has, and what God does. For me, the key to breaking the back of fear, as well as to beating back the complacency and spiritual torpor that so easily besets my soul, is to live in wonder. To live in soul enlivening, heart stopping wonder of all the things around me.
"The LORD wraps himself in light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on the water. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind." (NIV Psalm 104: 2-3) How awesome to contemplate, how Brobdingnagian is God because of what he can do. His cosmos, his creation, is where he resides. You are his creation, and he resides with you while in his creation. He provides "wine that gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts" (NIV Psalm 104:15) God is not only your provider of daily bread, he provides in liberality.
