imagine.

Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness… There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn’t that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.

-Mike Yaconelli-

I watch them.  My boys.  Bouncing from pillow to pillow pretending like the floor is a deep and blue and rapid ocean that will suck you in.  They are safe on the boats.  They are safe in my arms.  They are not safe on the floor.

I watch their world where everything is new and exciting and hilarious.  I answer their thousands and thousands of questions.  I listen to their stories and their songs, written about every move of their day. 

Some days their wonder and hope and magic and imagination takes my breath away. Sometimes I feel something in me moving and changing and relating to all of their magic.  

Some days the “voice of wonder and amazement” is foreign and frustrating.  Days where the voice that used to live in me when I was young and optimistic is silent.  And my children’s imagination is a tired routine of questions and loudness and messes.  And I wonder why it is so hard to relate to energy and laughter and hope.  It makes me feel like a fake.  Like I am faking it through a world full of wonder and mystery and magic.  A world that in the same breath is nasty and hateful and terrible.  Because deep down the voice seems so silent.

I go to a coffee shop a couple mornings a week to write and read.  There is a man that works there.  He is my favorite barista.  He is brilliant and hilarious and flamboyantly gay.  And I live in the South.  Today a cowboy came in and refused to respond to my barista spoke to him.  He stood, looked him in his beautiful and brilliant eyes and did not respond to anything that Beaux said.   Then, the cowboy went to a corner table to play kissy-face with his wife.  While my heart broke at the next table over.

Because this world is nasty and hateful and terrible.  It is an ocean, deep and blue and rapid that will suck you in.  You are not safe on the floor.

But there in the yuck, is the quiet whisper of a God:  holy and full of wonder and magic.  A God who calmed the oceans with a word.  A God who created and restores and redeems.   The God who offers safety in the pillows of his mercy.

Sometimes the world is far too loud to hear the voice of wonder.

Sometimes it is the only thing on earth that I know to be real.