Awe and Wonder: Seeing Creation Through God’s Eyes

Recently, one of our community members (BioLogos’ own Colin Hoogerwerf) told me a story.

He said he had been out in his garden cataloging pollinators (as one does) when he found a bug he had never seen before.

He was understandably excited. After all, someone who catalogs pollinators is no slouch in their knowledge of bugs, so it’s a big deal to find a new one.

The bug he found is called a jagged ambush bug, and it looks like a monster. He showed me a picture—several, actually.

The jagged ambush bug looked like some combination of leaf, rock, and terrifying alien. He told me that they sit atop flowers, waiting for the pollinators to come, then they use their huge claw arms to grab them and feast.

When Colin told me about his bug and showed me his many, many pictures, I asked him what day he saw it, expecting him to say, “yesterday” or “last weekend.” But he said, “sometime in July.”

July was months ago.

I stared at him and asked, “You’re still showing everyone pictures?”

I teased him, but the truth is, I think it’s beautiful. Colin was and continues to be bowled over by something he found in his own front yard. What Colin experienced was awe and wonder, which I am coming to believe is an important, if overlooked, spiritual discipline.

Awe and Wonder as a Spiritual Discipline

Wonder is that sense of awe that wells up when we slow down enough to pay attention.

Sometimes it strikes us accidentally, like when we happen to look out the window and catch a gorgeous sunset. But more often, we have to go looking for awe and wonder with the careful intention of someone who, say, catalogs pollinators. We have to pay close attention.

This is harder than it sounds.

Smartphones and the endless digital distractions of our culture don’t foster the necessary attentiveness. And culturally, we also tend to dismiss feeling awe as being silly.

When I was in seventh grade, I remember telling a friend about some wonder-filled moment. A popular kid overheard and said something like, “small things amuse small minds.”

He was just a kid trying to be clever, but his scorn scored points because it sounded more adult, as if boredom and cynicism are more serious ways to be in the world.

But I think Scripture tells a different story.

Awe in Scripture: God’s Own Wonder in Job

The book of Job betrays God’s heart on this matter.

In Job 39, God works to provoke wonder from Job as a way of giving him a little perspective. But it’s almost as if God, in speaking, also gets caught up in that wonder.

In the book, Job is suffering terribly and he has been bearing his friends’ theology of suffering. Exasperated, Job demands an audience with God.

But when God speaks to Job, beginning in chapter 38, God does not tell him why he has been suffering. Instead, God asks a mountain of questions.

At first, the tone seems sharp: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” (Job 38:4-5)

But God isn’t angry—he is returning Job to his place as a creature.

Job, it seems, has forgotten himself and has demanded answers to questions that are beyond him. God spends chapters 38 and 39 reminding Job that there is an awful lot that he doesn’t understand.

Near the end of chapter 38, the tone gentles significantly and the questions start to get more and more particular. It begins to feel like God has become swept up in God’s own delight and wonder at creation.

Chapter 39 begins with lines like this:

Have you ever thought of God counting the months until a doe gives birth? It’s so tender and intimate.

Then come the birds: “The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, though they cannot compare with the wings and feathers of the stork” (Job 39:13).

And later, God returns to the ostrich: “God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider” (Job 39:17-18).

Then when everything is done, God calls it “very good” (Genesis 1:31) and takes a day to rest and enjoy it all, later commanding that we do the same.

Robert Capon, Anglican priest and a writer for the New York Times food section, once wrote:

God likes it. Therefore, it stays. You stay and I do. And every bit of soil, and every jagged ambush bug, and every pregnant doe, and every ostrich who spreads her feathers to run.

You and I get to join that delight. Only, unlike God’s, ours does not come so much from a place of intricate understanding. After all, every knowledgeable person will tell you that the more they learn, the more they realize they don’t know.

Instead, our delight becomes wonder. It becomes awe.

How Awe and Wonder Humble Us

Awe also right-sizes us.

It reminds us, like it did Job, of who we are. We are fellow creatures, not gods. We were created on the same day as the animals. The breath of life breathed into us, just like them.

But we have been given a task that is different from the rest of creation: We are called to tend and keep what God has made and are given the honor of naming what we find. We are invited to share in the delight, to wonder at it all, and even to know the God who made it.

But our knowledge is only ever partial. We know just enough to recognize that it is beyond us, and to marvel at it, and so too, to marvel at its Creator.

Yet we are tempted, and often succumb to the temptation, to elevate ourselves as something more than creatures. We look down at the rest of creation, dissecting and dominating, as if we owned it.

Wonder plants our feet back on the ground. It humbles us back to ourselves.  Wonder reminds us that we, like the ostrich and the jagged ambush bug, are creatures, formed from the dust.

Why Awe and Wonder Matter for Creation Care

We need this humility because our lording it over creation has come at great cost to the rest of the creatures.

Many say that the climate crisis is a spiritual crisis. It is a failure of love, of compassion.

It is a failure at our first vocation: to tend and keep what God has made, to delight in it, to hold it in sacred trust.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can return to ourselves, to our God, to our first calling. And we can begin that return by pressing into wonder.

When we give God’s creation our attention, it reminds us of who we are. We can sit under God’s questions to Job ourselves, and instead of being the ones with all the answers we can revel in how much we don’t know.

That takes some effort, particularly when companies treat our attention as a commodity. We have to be intentional. But it is not impossible, because wonder is available everywhere, in every moment.

My call to you: Notice the flicker of a flame. Marvel at the fact that you could recognize your best friend’s voice on a telephone, distinct from every other voice in the world. Wonder at the feeling of the ground under you, or the roughness of your own fingerprints. Feel awe at the curl of a leaf, or a crooked smile, or at all the things that you don’t know that you don’t know.

Practicing Awe and Wonder in Everyday Life

Another way to cultivate wonder is to look for things you don’t understand, and see if you can see something you’ve never seen before. It sounds funny, but sometimes you can’t see things until you look for them.

In my own front yard, I have an Eastern Redbud tree. I have always thought it beautiful, but only a couple of years ago did I notice the circles, smaller than a dime, cut neatly into several of the leaves.

A friend of mine explained that those missing circles were taken by leaf cutter bees. These solitary bees stuff bits of leaf into a hollow twig, making a nest so that they can lay eggs.

I had never seen these little cuttings before—and now I see them everywhere. And I marvel at these tiny architects who know the materials they need and how to use them.