Walt Disney gave us talking mice with feelings and an agenda and we flock to Disney World to feed our stunted imaginations. Why? Maybe because we don’t take the time to see the amazing magical world in our own mind and at our own fingertips. We teach our children that imagination belongs in Florida and not in our house or our schools. So we are bored and watch TikTok.

But here is the thing. We have to be astute observers to see humor, enigma, beauty and enlightening contrasts in our own daily life. We have trained ourselves to only worship the God of our limited expectations, only see art in an art museum, only laugh when we watch a show that is listed as a comedy, only relax and look around when we are on an expensive vacation, only see mystery in a carefully crafted story-line of a crime drama and only use our imagination in Disney World. We have compartmentalized our lives. We have made our lives mundane. Yep, I said it. Boring! And we are solely responsible for our own boredom. I say this because I have been made aware of the amazing, crazy world around me through a book called Notes From The Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder In God’s Spoken World by N. D. Wilson. This book is not for everyone. The author has a strange sense of humor that I find fascinating. Don’t rush out and buy it with great expectations. It is a very different sort of book. It may not resonate with many the way it did with me but the idea behind it needs to be told. The author makes some valid points that we never hear.

God created so much that we miss because we are too busy to pay attention or we have put God’s creations in a box like everything else. Just last Sunday as I was sitting in church listening to the music, my eyes were opened. I worshipped with my eyes! There was a mom in the pew in front of me with a very young baby. This tiny baby was just learning to hold up her head. From my perspective, I could only see her fuzzy head and her perfect hand grasping her mother’s side. With tears in my eyes, I worshipped God for this amazing creation. Then I looked up and saw the most brilliant jewel colored light brightly beaming in through the stained glass window and had another moment. This open-eyed amazement was a gift God gave me. 

Some of the best humor is not from Jerry Seinfeld, not that there is anything wrong with that. Some of the best humor comes from God. You know, his Son is Jewish. Was this an accident? I think not. One example of God’s humor was the day my Labrador Retriever saw a bunny in the back yard. Thinking she could never catch that rabbit, I told her to get it just to watch her happily chase it. Unbeknownst to me, that rabbit didn’t know the way out and my dog came back to me victorious and proud as punch. I laughed and I cried until I could laugh and cry no more. Such a release of emotion all orchestrated by God. He created that moment in time, my dog, that fuzzy bunny as well as my cluelessness about that situation. 

We think we know our world around us, but it just keeps surprising us. My son had a mouse in his house recently. We told him all the techniques commonly used to trap mice. He went out and bought every mouse trap known to man and baited them with the peanut butter just like we told him. But alas, no luck. He was getting frustrated. Then he noticed that the mouse got into his habanero peppers on his kitchen counter. On a whim, he carefully placed a habanero pepper in the center of the sticky trap and in the middle of the night he was awakened by the sound of that struggling, stuck, habanero-eating mouse that was much bigger and tougher than expected. Peanut butter was for wimps. This was a macho mouse. 

So I will begin to try to see the built-in humor, mystery, beauty and wonder in the world my God spoke into being. He is a fascinating God.