Wonder?
The skies have been exceptionally clear lately. I took advantage of that fact a couple of nights ago in hauling the telescope out after the kids had gone to bed. There was a bright planet in the southern part of the sky I wanted to investigate, wanting to figure out whether it was Mars or Jupiter (I suspected the latter). Sure enough, it was, and it put on a good show. I called Diane out and we saw all four Galilean moons. With my recently-found “power doubler” (essentially a 6-inch tube), we were able to double the magnification of my closest lens and catch glimpses of the bands of gas swirling around the planet. I wish I had had it when we saw Saturn a few months ago–the rings would have been even more spectacular than they were. But it will come around again.
Diane went back inside; she’s not much interested when I start looking at things that aren’t planets, and I pointed the telescope at Vega, almost always directly overhead during the summer months. It’s a beautiful star. It is bluish-white and looks like a sapphire against the darkness. It’s one of the three stars (with Altair and Deneb) that make up the “Summer Triangle,” one of the landmarks, if you will, of the sky. Deneb is the brightest star in my favorite constellation, Cygnus, or the Swan, always easy to spot soaring prominently over the summer sky, wings outstretched, tips raked back. It’s always a familiar and welcome sight.
In addition to the R.C. Sproul podcasts to which I’m a dedicated listener, I’ve added extras, among them Ravi Zacharias’ podcast, Let My People Think. The most recent one is a Q&A; session after a lecture to faculty and students at Georgia Tech, and it’s exciting and inspiring to listen to one of the greatest Christian thinkers of our time go at it, as it were, with a succession of students. Some of them asked very good questions. One question I found particularly arresting was: “You’ve identified loss of meaning as a problem … and so, what should be the meaning?” His reply:
I appreciate that question because I believe we are living in a postmodernist time when we wonder what meaning really means. There are four components to finding meaning in life. I put [them] on a grid as you grow from childhood.
When you are in your years of childhood, the thing that keeps you going in a sense is the enchantment with life–the sense of wonder about everything that you see. But as you get older you can no longer believe in all of the fairy stories. As wonderful as they were, you know that those were all figments of people’s imaginations. And you come into your teens and your early twenties and the question of truth becomes supreme. Not whether this belief of mine or this experience of mine brings me a sense of wonder, but whether this experience of mine is also based in truth. Truthfulness becomes an important category…
As you move along into the years of the twenties and the thirties where your commitments are being made and your relationships are developed, you’re looking for love beyond merely romance. It is a love of relationships and affections, whether it be in a family or whether it be in friendships. And finally you’re looking for the concept of security: How do I know what it is that I believe will ultimately stand the test of time, and is there a life, for example, beyond the grave?
What brings meaning is when you can combine a sense of wonder under-girded by truth, experiencing the richness of love, with a knowledge of security. Those four components bring genuine meaning to life. And the older you get the more it takes to fill your heart with wonder and only God is big enough to fill that heart.
He goes on to give examples of just having one or two of these components in isolation, and how that fails to give a cohesive structure for meaning in an individual’s life. Excellent stuff. Between that lecture and the stars a couple of nights ago it reminded me of a post from a while back.