“One of the tragedies of growing up is that we get used to things. It has its good side of course, since irritations may cease to be irritations.
But there is immense loss when we get used to the redness of the rising sun,
and the roundness of the moon,
and the whiteness of the snow,
the wetness of rain,
the blueness of the sky,
the buzzing of bumble bees,
the stitching of crickets,
the invisibility of wind,
the unconscious constancy of heart and diaphragm,
the weirdness of noses and ears,
the number of the grains of sand on a thousand beaches,
the never-ceasing crash crash crash of countless waves,
and ten million kingly-clad flowers flourishing and withering in woods and mountain valleys where no one sees but God.
I invite you, with Clyde Kilby, to seek a ‘freshness of vision,’ to look, as though it were the first time, not at the empty product of accumulated millennia of aimless evolutionary accidents (which no child ever dreamed of), but at the personal handiwork of an infinitely strong, creative, and exuberant Artist who made the earth and the sea and everything in them.
I invite you to believe (like the children believe) ‘that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course you shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega’ (note 11, resolution 10).”
–John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Portland, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 1991), 95-96.
