Accustomed to the Amazing

So it's been a while since I've written, but I've definitely had some thoughts rattling around in my head here recently & thought I would share them here. I don't want to waste anyone's time by writing stuff that doesn't strike me as important/interesting, but when this thought hit me late last night, I knew I wanted to write about it.

I spent the last half of this past week in the Atlanta area taking part in the Orange Conference. I attended Orange 2 years ago & had a great few days of inspiration, challenge, information, etc. It was a great few days. Orange 10 was no different. Oddly enough though, the thought I wanted to write about wasn't anything that was said/triggered by a speaker or breakout during the few days.

I had a direct flight from Atlanta to Kansas City last night & I was seat 38C. It was the aisle seat in the last row on the plane. As we were accelerating & heading down the runway to take off, it seemed odd to me to see more than 190 people simply going about their business - reading books, listening to their ipods, talking, yawning, doing sudoku puzzles & word-searches, etc. We were in a giant steel cylinder, weighing multiple tons, accelerating in speed, & leaving the earth to ascend into the air. I don't fly all the time, but I've flown enough to have ignored the weirdness of this event, but I noticed it yesterday. The 190 ticket payers + the flight attendants behaving as if what was taking place is completely normal. There is nothing normal about something that weighs as much as this plane flying in the air! It may happen often, but it's not normal! It's amazing. It's amazing & we're used to it. This amazing thing was happening all around us, but it went almost completely unnoticed.

It hit me that there are a lot of things that are amazing that we have grown accustomed to & because of us growing in comfort, we lose the wonder. I take it for granted that if I want to have some grapes for a snack, all I have to do is go to the grocery store & pick some up. So what if it's December. I'm accustomed to having them when I want them & don't give the fact that those grapes are shipped in from another continent & on my table in a matter of a couple days.

I have grown accustomed to being able to connect with friends & family, in a matter of seconds, regardless of how much distance may separate us. Cell phones, email, facebook, are just a few ways to keep in touch & stay connected. Take a second to think about how difficult it would be to maintain relationships with friends living 1000 miles away 100 years ago. Correspondence would take weeks not seconds.

There are so many amazing things that should make us marvel that we have simply gotten used to. Whether it's the ease of our travel, where or how your food finds its way to your table, how quickly modern communication connects us to one another, we have simply become a hard people to impress.

The greatest example of this is in regard to God. There is nothing normal about him, but most of us have become accustomed to him & live as such. While he is doing amazing things in the world around us, we are distracted by the truly normal things we choose to focus on.