It has been said that Chuck Norris is two of the wonders of the world. And he can divide by zero.
A class in Chicago was asked to list what they considered to be the Seven Wonders of the World. With few disagreements they came up with: Egypt's Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Panama Canal, the Empire State Building, St. Peter's Basilica and China's Great Wall.
One student was having trouble making her choices. When the teacher asked her for her list she said: to touch, to taste, to see, to hear. She hesitated a little, and then added, to feel, to laugh and to love. The room was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop.
True story - G.K. Chesterton went out to the downs with a great quantity of brown paper and a handful of chalk to do some sketching. He loved "the quality of brownness in October woodsand with a bright-colored chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness."
The problem was Chesterton forgot the white chalk. He needed this "exquisite and essential chalkas fierce as red" and "as extensive as black". I'll leave the reader to figure out the moral implications of white.
Sitting in despair, reflecting, he suddenly stood up and roared with laughter. The hills all about were made of chalk, white chalk. "Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hourglass," he mused. "Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt waterfor some chemical experiment."
Blindness is all about us. There is much we fail to see. We should be leaping up and roaring with laughter several times a day. We are not good at seeing "the extraordinary inside the ordinary", as Chesterton put it.
Fortunately Jesus does not leave us to our vision-challenged devices. He leaps (notice how he ignores the verb tense of time) to his feet, abandons heaven, and comes to rescue us from our blind desert journey. He puts us on his shoulder and carries us, fine shepherd that he is.
Not only that, God gave us fiery prophets like Elijah and John the Baptist who leaped up and proclaimed the wonders we are so prone to ignore.
You and I have been given another year to enjoy the wonders of this world. May it be a year filled with laughter, the occasional shouts, and the quietness of a pin-drop.
