“Stop and consider God’s wonders.” Job 37:14 (NIV)
Last March, my husband and I became parents. It’s the biggest learning curve I think I’ve ever been on: not just in terms of working out how on earth to look after a baby, but also in teaching me more about who God is, about his love for me, and about how to live in the light of that.
My ten month old daughter is fascinated and enchanted in equal measure by almost everything she sets eyes on. Every day is a voyage of discovery: new sights, sounds, faces and experiences.
Miriam will spend hours examining a piece of tin foil, a stray length of string. The beaten-up box the shiny new toy came in is much more fun than the toy itself. She goes “sailing” in my washing basket. She spots the robin I’m too busy to notice, greeting it with high-pitched squeals of joy. She sees the things I’ve long stopped seeing: a cat sunning itself, a small child’s smile across the coffee shop. She’s liberal with smiles and greetings: reserved not just for family and friends, but doled out with abandon to strangers in supermarket queues.
As another New Year dawns, full of possibility and potential, change and challenge, I’m determined to learn from my daughter. To take time to stop and look, to notice God’s fingerprints marking everything around me. To see his image in the things he has made, in the people I know, in the strangers I meet. To beat back my cynicism and dissatisfaction about the state of the world, its messiness and brokenness; to choose instead to wonder at its beauty and to recognise and celebrate God at work.
As we pray together at the start of this year, let’s ask that the God who laid the earth’s foundation would fill us afresh with childlike, wide-eyed wonder.
Sam Luscombe,
Marketing and Communications Executive