How to See the Miracle in the Everyday
Can filling our own cup help us to see more of the beauty of the world?
One of my goals is to see the miracle in the everyday. I want to be able to marvel at the sheer wonder of a single rock on the side of the road. I want to be knocked flat by the radiant beauty of the mountains I live next to. I want to savor the crisp sweetness of an apple.
I especially want this with people. When I see people, I want to see them the way that I think God sees them. I want to be blown away by the sheer beauty of their radiant essence, by the wonder of their souls. I want to feel a sense of awe and gratitude that I get to inhabit this world next to so many astounding and wonderful people.
But for all my desire, I find that I can't willpower or muscle my way into seeing the miracles all around me. I can't evoke the feelings of awe and wonder that I desire just by focusing more intensely on something.
I saw clearly over the past few weeks. I would try to see the beauty of the world; but try as I might, it would slip through my fingers. I could see the beauty on an intellectual level. But it wouldn't really touch or move my soul.
I think the reason is that I let myself be stressed. I worried about money, about friendships, about how I was going to balance my time, about how my wife and I were going to save enough to have children. And these worries ate at me. They filled me with fear, which narrowed my vision. Indulging these worries reified my own feeling that I was defective, which narrowed my vision even more. Instead of seeing the beauty of the world, all I could see was me: my worries, my concerns, my feelings of inadequacy, my uncertainty that God would provide for me. The more I focused on me, the less I could see the sheer majesty of the world around me.
So what changed? It wasn't that these worries went away. Generally speaking, I'm leery of the idea that the best way to change our internal landscape is to change our external circumstances.
Instead, what changed was that I shifted my focus. I stopped trying so hard to see the beauty of the world (and, correspondingly, I stopped beating myself up when I couldn't see said beauty). And instead, I started focusing more on God. In particular, I focused on how He saw me.
And as I felt God's love for me overwhelm me, as I felt it sink into my pores and change my soul, something amazing happened. The fear and guilt and shame receded, and when they receded, I had more space to actually see the world accurately.
Or to put it another way: when I felt how deeply God loved me, I felt that love overflowing out of me and into the rest of the world. Suddenly, I could see the world much more accurately. I could see the radiant beauty of a single brick in my apartment complex. I could see the wonderful mystery of another human being.
My wife explains this phenomenon with a phrase she calls filling the cup. The idea (which she didn't invent) is that God is like a faucet that's always pumping out water, and we're a cup. Where our water overflows, that's where we do really wonderful things for other people. That's also where, in my case, I can practise seeing the wonderful things about other people.
In this metaphor, there are two ways to navigate the world. The first is to turn our cup sideways and focus first on pouring our existing water out into the world. That's what a lot of us do. That way can get some quick results, but the problem is that we run out of water pretty fast. The other way is to keep the cup turned face-up towards the faucet, and to focus first on simply receiving from God. Then the cup fills up and overflows consistently.
Or to put it another way: if I want to see the beauty of the world, maybe the best way to get there is to focus on how God sees the beauty of me. If I want to feel a deep and abiding love for other people, maybe the best way to get there is to focus on God's deep and abiding love for me. When I turn towards the faucet and let God fill up my cup, it overflows and changes the way that I see everything else.
If you want to see more of the beauty in the world, try this: focus on turning first towards God. Let Him fill your cup to the brim. And then, as you focus on how much He cherishes you and on how delighted He is in you, you may find that your perspective on the world starts to change.
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