I often get the opportunity to fill in and facilitate group discussions at a local senior living facility.
Usually, the topics are big theological questions or debates. Sometimes we discuss heavy biblical narratives or spend time dissecting ancient texts.
But this last month, I got to facilitate a conversation about awe and wonder — something we experience as human beings, but not something we often spend time talking about with one another.
We began by drawing wisdom from a psalm of David. David looks upon the night sky and wonders aloud about the heavens, the moon, the stars, and the mystery that God would be mindful of human beings at all.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
From there, we began talking about awe and wonder.
We talked about the ways we experience awe in inexplicable moments of beauty: stars in the night sky, powdered snow on mountaintops, looking out into the ocean, childbirth, holding a newborn baby.
We talked about all the ways we experience the joy of awe and wonder.
And then the conversation took another turn.
Because awe and wonder are not only found in the joy and celebration of life. Sometimes they are found in the unexplainable grief, the inconceivable realities of suffering, and the things we face that we still cannot fully understand.
We turned to Genesis, to the heavy, lonesome, isolating story of Jacob. And yet, after his dream, Jacob wakes up and says:
“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
The people around that table, many of them living in their eighth and ninth decades of life, began opening up about some truly devastating and unimaginable sufferings they had lived through.
Cancer.
Diagnosis.
Losing a child.
Losing a grandchild.
Losing a spouse.
Losing everything they had.
And as I facilitated that group discussion, I found myself in awe.
I was in awe watching them share their stories with courage and vulnerability.
I was in awe that they were able to stay seated at that table and engage in faithful conversation after enduring so much life.
They had held space for the awe and wonder of beauty, and they also held space for the awe and wonder of tragedy — the kind they had never been able to fully explain.
I came prepared to teach about awe and wonder.
Instead, I encountered awe and wonder sitting with people in their 80s and 90s.
I listened as they shared stories of grief, loss, resilience, childbirth, miracles, child loss, friendship, heartbreak, and joy — all the things that come with our human experience.
The room held a kind of wisdom that can only be earned through decades of living.
And what struck me most was not the absence of suffering.
It was the way wonder had somehow survived alongside it.
Their stories carried the paradox of a life that is both fragile and resilient. Both painful and beautiful.
I entered the room with materials and discussion questions.
I left feeling like a student, grateful to have been invited into a space so sacred.
Sometimes awe is not found in grand vistas or extraordinary events.
Sometimes it appears simply in a circle of people who have lived long enough to recognize grace when it passes through the room.
So may you enter into spaces this week — maybe feeling like the facilitator, the leader, or the teacher — and remember that we are all students on this journey of life.
May you step into spaces recognizing and naming them as sacred, trusting that God is alongside you in the awe, the wonder, the grief, and the joy.
May you go into the world sharing your stories of awe and wonder.
May you listen deeply to the stories of awe and wonder from others.
And may you remember that we are all on this journey of life together.
Truly, we need each other to survive it.
Amen.
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