Thursday, April 26, 2012

Like Spoiled Children

I've started reading a new book, and God has already been graciously altering my perspective on life. I'd like to share an excerpt from that book.

"Back when I got out of high school, I used to think about stuff like that all the time. It was a phase, I think, but i used to suddenly realize I was alive and human. I felt like I was in a movie and had two cameras for eyes, and I'd swivel my head around as though I were moving my cameras atop a tripod. I even wrote a poem about it and said we were 'spirit bound by flesh, held up by bone and trapped in time.' Back then I wondered why nobody else realized what a crazy experience we were all having. Back then I'd be lying in bed or walking down a hallway at college, and the realization I was alive would startle me, as though it had come up from behind and slammed two books together. We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren't capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on, and you're groggy and pointing at things saying circle and blue and car and then sex and job and health care. The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We are all like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given - it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral."
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller (page 58)

How can you read this and not feel enlightened, how could you not want to take more delicate note of the beauty around you?

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