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Wonderful Things

             Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law. I am a stranger on earth; do not hide your commands from me. (Psalm 119:18-19)

                 Hikikomori (Japanese): Pulling inward; shutting oneself in.

                I seem to keep coming back to the idea that wisdom is dealing with reality as it is rather than as we want it to be. And in Scripture, we find wisdom that goes even a little deeper, not only describing how reality is, but also how it was designed to be. In the past month or so, I’ve also read at least part of two books that sound alarms about the direction things appear to be going. I have always felt like an outsider, so the mention above of being a stranger on the earth is nothing new.

                It’s the first part of the passage above that causes tension. Do I really want to see wonderful things in His law? How do we know if we’re missing something? Does it take spending 24-hours per day studying Scripture to get to the point where God is revealing those wonderful things? How deeply are they hidden? When we read verses like this, I tend to fall into the “there must be millions of wonderful things, and I’m missing all but maybe three!” I’m sure that the list of wonderful things is more numerous than we realize, but two questions come to mind:

1)       What if the key isn’t in the number, but in the wondrousness of the wonderful things? What if we’re looking to keep count of the millions of wonderful things the size of the ants, and missing the wondrousness of the ten the size of elephants?

2)       Are we really paying attention to and delighting in the wonderful things we’ve already found? Are we responding to the “obvious” ones like loving God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths, loving our neighbors as ourselves, praying for our enemies (have you thought about how amazing that one is?),   the promise that God causes all things to work together for the good of those who have been called according to his purpose, and that God perceives our thoughts from afar? Make your own list of wonderful “elephants” if you wish – do we appreciate them as we should?

The Japanese term above is the word used for locking oneself in a room for months at a time because the stress of everyday life in Japan is too great for some people. I think that even though we may feel driven to find the million ants, we end up closing down to wonderfulness and fail to find any if we are too concerned about our count. Find one and relish it for an hour,  day, month, or even a year. Munch on it and get out every drop of goodness and health you can.

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