I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains.
Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself
within and without you and be happy.
Anne Frank
The Way,
then, is written in our nerves, our blood, our tissues, in the total organization of life…The Christian Way is written
not merely in the texts of Scripture but in the texture of life. It is the way
we are made to live….No mere event outside of us, however great, can take the place of an indwelling God, the Holy Spirit
within us. Only an Indwelling can rid us of indwelling fears….Nothing holds
you unless it holds you from within –there must be Life… Divine Life
working as dynamic in the depths of us. There must be Withinness of authority
and withinness of power….And if we are possessed of the Holy Spirit, we will be made like Him.
E. Stanley Jones, The Way to Power & Poise
I begin this New Year with a resolve to improve my sense of wonder…
gaining fresh insights into that awesome Intelligence that governs our universe. At
Christmas, I watched photographs on a computer screen of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes soaring over my brother’s
place in Kentucky. Captured, too, were the distant and thrilling wild honks of
their signals to one another as the photos revealed their looping circular flight as they corrected their southeastern path
to their wintering place in Florida. Come springtime, that same inbred Intelli-gence
will guide them northwestward to their native Canadian summer home as the migration cycle is completed. The beautiful documentary Wild Migration informed us of similar
bird migrations taking place annually in all parts of the world. Ergo, we know
from experience that similar cycles govern monarch butterflies, zebra migrations in East Africa, the life cycles of plants,
ebb and flow of ocean tides, and revolution of planets in space…all precisely on schedule according to some marvelous
atomic clock. Blessed am I and all who know intuitively that all of this did
not and does not happen by chance.
Likewise, with thanks to cousin Dottie, I watched with riveting interest emperor penguins in the Oscar winning
documentary, The March of the Penguins – the spectacle of their “migration” march to an ancient breeding
place in the Antarctic to raise their young, the ritual of how they mate, exchange custody of the egg and the chick, and occasionally
grieve over the death of their adorable chicks -- all of this drama played out in wretched freezing extreme sub-zero temperatures.
Ravi Zacharias, in a sermon entitled, Pursuit of Meaning: Regaining the Wonder, asked the question: “How can
we find life’s meaning?” First, we need to regain that sense of wonder, he said. We do so by understanding
that Creation as documented in Genesis is the truth and by discounting the skeptics’ false notions that all of life
happened by some incredible coincidence or chance of evolution. Thus we are led to gratitude and worship of the Creator. Essential, too, is our need for loving and enduring relationships. Finally, we need an enduring eternal relationship with our Lord to comprehend life’s meaning and
to fully appropriate the great happiness He wants to give us.
So
I pray for wisdom to share the wonder of this message in new and refreshing ways with what one writer has called “a
fragile net of words”. Ä