Out of This World

So. There was an eclipse tonight. As my last committee finished at 6:00, someone noted that the predicted eclipse had begun, so... at peril of people "out there" thinking we were crazy, we turned off the office lights and huddled to look out my office windows at the shadow creeping across the moon poised over the Blue Mountains.

I settled down at my desk and started some follow-up work, and then the phone rang. It was Husband.

"Did you see the eclipse?" he asked.

"Oh yeah." I leaned forward at my desk and looked out the window. Yup. The shadow had grown.

"I'm driving up 4th Street looking at it," Husband said. "It's cool."

Sure, it was cool. I went back to work.

When I got home twenty minutes later, Husband was in the front yard with the neighbor kids and their dad, watching the eclipse. Huh. Too cold for me. And there's not a whole lot of action in an eclipse. Whatever. Seen it a bunch of times.

For the record, I am not jaded. I can get quite excited about out-of-this-world events. For example, on Monday morning a sudden flash of light filled the bedroom just before 5:30 a.m. (I did not take the above picture). It was bright enough that it woke me up. A transformer must have blown, I thought.

I was lying there trying to go back to sleep, when there was a rumble and the house shook. What on earth was that? It almost sounded like something had hit the roof and was rolling down.

The paper--which comes in the afternoon in our town--carried the story. And that's when I got really impressed. A huge meteor (called a "bolide" once it enters earth's atmosphere and starts burning up in earnest) had entered the earth's atmosphere over the Northwest, and the bright flash of it had been seen across eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle.

Cool!!!

The rumble was the meteor doing something with breaking the sound barrier.

VERY Cool!!!

As far as we heard, it burned up before hitting the earth. Or at least, it didn't fall on anyone.

Parenthetically, the paper quoted one of the valley residents as saying he had just stepped into his hot tub when he saw it come over. Now our question is this: WHO goes out and sits in his hot tub at 5:15 a.m. . . and why?

I was thinking about all this, and wondered why I was so nonchalant about the total eclipse. It's because I've seen them before in my life, several times. They're predictable. They look similar every time you see them.

A bolide, on the other hand, is not something everyone sees in their lifetime. And they probably don't get to hear the sonic boom and feel the house shake. So although each event is amazing, it's the rare unpredictable one that gets the attention.

I thought of what I've been learning in Psalms for the past two days. Psalm 148 tells us to praise. Everyone is supposed to praise him, from the sun and moon to the oceans to the animals to the flowers to the people. Yeah, yeah. So we hear the word "praise" all the time. "I don't even really know how to do that!" I complained in my worship journal. "I don't particularly feel like doing it."

Well, that ought to be my big clue! We were created to give praise to our Creator. I know that.

So I decided to try to fulfill my purpose. The day was filled with deliberate praise, any time I thought of it, any time I prayed. And a good day it was, appreciating something that seemed so ordinary: the simple, everyday fact that God created me.

Then this morning I read in Psalm 149:5: "Let the saints rejoice in this honor and sing for joy on their beds." And I laughed, right there in my worship time, at the picture of all the saints sitting up on their beds and singing, la-la-la!

What am I saying? I'm saying that we usually become so accustomed to the daily event of waking up to a new day of life, so accustomed to God giving us one breath after another, that it's like me with the lunar eclipse this evening: we become nonchalant about the miracle, and the wonder is elusive.

What am I saying? I'm saying there is a miracle in the very fact that we're created. It's a miracle so big and awe-inspiring that we should wake up every day singing for joy on our beds in praise to the One who made us. If we have lost joy in the simple, specific fact of being created by God, we are missing spiritual life-in-color.

What am I saying? If that kind of wonder and praise doesn't make itself immediately apparent in your life, it's time to go in search of it, and to find your way back to Praise as you freshly comprehend this amazing, out-of-this-world event: the joy of being a living creation.