Blog #15: Wonder as a Spiritual Practice

Category: Theme — Volume 2 (Wonder)* 4 min read

When did you last feel small in a good way? Small in the way that makes the world feel larger and God feel closer?

Not small in the way you feel on a hard day, when the weight makes you feel invisible. A different kind of small. The kind that arrives when you are stopped — actually stopped, not just waiting — by something you did not expect to notice.

A child asks a question you have no answer for and you realize the question is better than any answer you could have given.

You look at your own hand, really look at it, and register for the first time in a long time that it works. That it has been working this whole time. That someone who was not you designed the way it closes around a cup.

The first light of morning comes through a window and lays itself across the floor in a shape you did not arrange and could not have arranged. It just arrives. It has been arriving your whole life.

You cut yourself and a week later the skin has closed. You did not manage this. You did not even think about it while it was happening. Something in you remembered how to heal without consulting you.

These are the moments I mean.

Most of us have been trained to think of wonder as something that happens to us on vacation. At the Grand Canyon. Under the Northern Lights. On some rare occasion set aside for awe, requiring travel, planning, and a view.

But wonder is not vacation. Wonder is already here. Wonder is the quality of attention we have mostly stopped paying to the ordinary.

The world does not require a new sky to be astonishing. It only requires us to look at the sky we have, for long enough, with something other than our usual hurry.

This is why wonder cannot be manufactured on demand. It is not a feeling you summon. It is a posture you recover.

I want to say something carefully now, because I think it is the heart of this.

Wonder, in the spiritual sense, is how we remember that we are not God.

We forget this constantly. Not because we are arrogant. Because we are responsible. The weight of adulthood trains us to act as if the world rests on our management of it. Our children. Our households. Our jobs. Our bodies. Our decisions. Our schedules. We carry so much that we start to believe — quietly, without meaning to — that we are the ones keeping things in motion.

And then something happens. A small thing. Light through a window. A hand that works. A child asking why.

And for a moment, we are reminded that there is a vast order beneath the one we manage. That something other than us is holding the whole of it together. That we did not make the light, and we are not making the light, and we are not required to make the light.

That reminder is not a demotion. It is a mercy.

The relief of wonder is the relief of setting down a weight we were never supposed to be carrying.

This is why the Scriptures are full of people falling to their knees. It is not performance. It is what happens in the body when wonder finally breaks through the managing. When you remember, in your knees and in your chest, that the God you have been talking to is larger than the boxes you have built for Him. When you remember that the world is not a problem you are solving. It is a gift you are living inside of.

The kneeling is the body telling the truth before the mouth catches up.

Here is the reframe I want to offer, and then I will stop.

Wonder is not the opposite of worship. Wonder is worship in its most honest form.

Worship is not something that happens only in a building on Sunday. Worship happens every time you stop managing long enough to notice that the world is held by someone other than you. Every time you look at the light on the floor and register that you are inside a gift you did not arrange.

You have been worshipping, quietly, without calling it that, every time wonder has stopped you in your tracks.

You are more practiced at this than you know.

The invitation this week is not to try to feel wonder. It is to stop suppressing the wonder that is already finding you.

It is finding you in your kitchen. In your car. In the face of someone you love. In your own body. In the quiet moments between the hurries.

You do not have to go anywhere to meet it. You only have to stop long enough to let it meet you.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

The Porchlight is on. 🔆
© 2025 Wylette P. Tillman | Polaris Press LLC