To today's school-age parent: What's AWEsome?

Entire series: {PART 1} {PART 2} {PART 3} {PART 4} {PART 5} {PART 6} {PART 7}

Thank you for sticking with me on some serious posts and a short hiatus for the series. We moved to another house and I had back surgery – unrelated, though they do make for an interesting combination. I’m not writing about either today.

In fact, something of a content turn from the three previous posts in this series. They touched on today’s feeling in conflict with wisdom, the value – and limits -- of happiness, and the choice of “hard” in my child’s life. Today, you see from the title that we’re asking about awe in my child’s life.

Maybe more helpful than just a definition would be to think about two related elements of ‘awe in practice’: 1) What’s bigger than the self, and 2) Does the feeling move me? For what I’m talking about, we’re asking these questions for ourselves but mostly for our children.

Most aspects of living today bring everything down to size for me, and even more for my children. A child starts with almost everything being bigger than himself. He feels awe and wonder and fear about everything while looking quickly to the parent’s securing presence to know that ‘it won’t get me’ and ‘I’m going to be ok.’

Let me and my today’s child get media savvy and entertainment-involved, and I think it all changes for me and even more for my still developing child.

I see things happening everywhere around the world and even in space brought close. With perspective, space exploration could bring great awe but not if downsized into today’s interesting video shot sequenced with the coolest new Photoshop effects on Instagram and thrilling computer generated imagery (CGI) graphics and Dolby sound from the new Marvel blockbuster.

Those things are today’s reality, and there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with them. The question is attitude and effect – mostly my attitude and my child’s effect.

Do I stop? Stop and give time and space and voice and vision to what is real and great and special and, without a doubt, so much bigger than ourselves? From a young age with my child, do I honor and give space to my child’s healthy wonder? Do I seek out the noteworthy and introduce my child to it?

Or, am I “over” it all? Have I been there and have the t-shirt? Is life too busy and pressured and mundane and commonplace? Has everything been brought down to size for me? Following this, am I ever moved? Do I have emotional margin to be touched and affected, to be moved and changed?

What can move us, and honestly what should? In nature, God offers the awe-inspiring if we’re looking and listening. From a local cliff, sunset or cloud speckled sky to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the simple ocean waves we can and should be moved by His creation.

I can share that experience with my child, or miss it, or even blot it out. If I’m there to experience it and instead I treat it as nothing, I share that jaded worldview with my child. For a simple example, if I never bother to wake up for a sunrise, I say loud and clear to my little boy or girl that there’s nothing there worth waking up for.

I so know it’s hard. Hard to plan and prepare. Hard to stop and consider. Hard to be moved. And hard even to feel at times. But it matters a lot.

The occasions for wonder and even awe are not confined to the Grand Canyon or Outer Space. When we consider rightly our own limits, our finiteness, our mortality, we can touch things bigger than ourselves all around.

An early morning walk up Turkey Mountain can break the mist into a glimpse of beauty beyond the everyday. The Tallgrass Prairie at Pawhuska offers a welcome mat to the ‘big gulp’ expanse of an ocean of grass, not as big as it once was but so much bigger than ourselves. And the bison – a beast of startling size and strength if I’m paying attention.

I heard a parent describe a moment of wonder for her teenager which sounded both available and altogether healthy to me. They were opening the box to a new, more than run of the mill computer, and he stopped and just looked and then touched with excitement and appreciation. It’s not quite awe but it is stopping to be touched.

And we can take that path toward greater appreciation of what’s beyond us. God gave us as human beings those abilities to create awe-inspiring technology. Study just a bit and appreciate with your children the incredible smallness of digital circuitry, the astounding speed of computer calculation, the breathtaking breadth of microcircuit connection processing exabytes of data – fearfully far reaching factors of ten past any numbers we think about day to day.

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Abolition of Man and in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, writes in different ways of the awe-inspiring beauty and joy which are beyond us but which call to us and speak to us of our Creator God whose image and character they appeal to for their power. They move us because of who He is and who we are made to be.

Here is the vital importance of awe in the lives of our children. If we human beings are all that, know it all, and are the measure of what is then there’s not much that matters beyond us. If, though, there is so much more to be discovered in the God who made us and calls us to Himself, His beauty, His joy, and His love, then my experience of awe is training in the testimony of God to Himself.

That, more than anything, is what I don’t want our all too modern children to miss. I matter as a child whom God loves. I’m just getting started grasping the enormity and the excellence of a world which speaks to the character possessed by the Sovereign Lord of all.