The other day, my family and I were driving down the highway when a massive flock of birds rose from a lake and flew over the car, endlessly blanketing the early evening sky.

I opened the sunroof to give my daughters a better view, and my five-year-old daughter looked up and said, “Daddy, it’s a miracle – and we didn’t even have to ask Jesus for it!”

Listening to my daughter’s praise took me back to my own sense of wonder during my childhood.  When a strong breeze would cause tree branches to sway back and forth in the wind, my mother would point to them and say, “Look at that, Joshua – the trees are praising the Lord.”

I remember looking up at the branches in wonder as their arms flowed back and forth in the same way my mother’s arms did during church services as she worshiped Jesus.  And in that moment, I believed that the trees were alive – and why wouldn’t I?  I could see it with my own eyes.  They could praise God, just like us.

I want to be childlike when I look around at nature.  I want to reclaim the wonder when I consider, for example, that my daughters actually grew inside my wife for nine months; or when I think of all of the complex brain and body work that keeps me from getting killed as I drive to the grocery store.

Science may be able to explain the flock, the blowing branches, the fertilized human egg, or my brain signals; but it cannot take away the wonder.  And that sense of wonder should flow from the fact that every created thing in the universe lives in a world full of miracles – and we didn’t even have to ask for them.

“In Him we live and move and have our being.”  Acts 17:28.

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