“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In some odd way, our lives often get interrupted by God. And it can happen a lot. When it does bit seems we miss it. Our night sky here in Alaska is wonderful. And I’m a “sky guy”, it means I’m always looking up. But the most phenomenal night skies were in Mexico, while camping on the beach. As I laid there I looked and the Milky Way was on full display. It really was as good as it could be. It seemed there was 10x more stars than ever before.
As I gazed up a weird sort of fear gripped me, it was almost a panic. I started to tremble and shake. I got up and ran to our tent. I just couldn’t handle the incredible universe with no buffer. I was completely undone, and reduced a quivering speck of dust. I tried to tell my wife what had just happened to me, but I couldn’t. I was too scrambled.
Reflecting on this, I realize now what I had experienced was “awe.” It was something much more common a few generations ago. There is a kind of existential crisis which we side-step in these more modern times. We rarely contemplate the night sky. We seldom, if ever, have seen fire in bush.
We have traded our awareness of an Almighty God, and in turn we get to pick all black berries we can haul. We reason it out, and we feel that we have made a better bargain. When we extract from our souls this faith we will find that we have become spiritually bankrupt.
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies announce what his hands have made.”
Psalms 19:1, NCV
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- better than “blackberries” (tallmonasticguy.typepad.com)









When the Darkness Will Not Lift: Doing What We Can While We Wait for God—And Joy Publisher Crossway Books, Author John Piper, ISBN 1581348762 Price $7.99, Released, January 2007
