I wish I could take the play button out of this shot but it was a clip from a video I took a few years ago.
This was a split second of lightning that lit up the flat black night.
Images like this remind me I’ve really lived. I don’t want to look back at the end of this life with the thought that things as impressive as this lightning strike happened unnoticed.
I’m currently reading Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel. He quotes Erma Bombeck in a column entitled “If I Had My Life to Live Over Again”?
I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains. I would never have bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn’t show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. When my child kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, “Later. Now get washed up for dinner.” There would have been more I love yous, more I’m sorrys, but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute, look at it and really see it, live it, and never give it back.
Erma Bombeck
If your wonder has wandered, what has robbed your attention from the little wonders God sends you every day? Will you get to the end and find you had an underwhelming experience of God’s little wonders through a 5.8 inch screen?
I’ve dabbled in writing songs over the years and listened recently to one tutorial about how to keep the chorus bigger…
…smaller verses.
In this illustration, let’s say the chorus belongs to God and is to be sung with gladness. It is meant to be the mountain top of the song. If the chorus is our highest thoughts of praise to God, the verses are about us.
Verses are meant to describe the chorus. They run around and up the mountain so that by the time you reach the chorus, it swells with context from personal experience.
As a young songwriter, I unknowingly would write the chorus melody first. Because it came first, I thought it was supposed to be the verse. I then found it harder to find a chorus that could stand above the melody I gave the verse.
I can look at a song I wrote 20 years ago and just switch the good melody from the verse to the chorus and make the verse less interesting through imaginative thought not reliant upon the melody.
Maybe you can’t sing the current chorus of your life because your verses drown out it’s wonder.
The Holy Spirit speaks but remember his dove-like gentleness. It’s not that God can’t compete with competing voices as much as He won’t.
Turn off that device and get outside. Skip a meal to really enjoy the next. Get in your closet and pray til you pray.
Resist the urge to remind the world you’re important and do whatever you can to put the chorus of praise to God in its rightful place.
Now that you’ve loaded the slow cooker of returning wonder… wait on Him. You’re wonder will return whether He sends lightning or a lightning bug.
Tim Holman, Writer 