The philosopher Ryan Holiday writes about moments of awe:

The soft paw prints of a cat on the dusty trunk of a car. The hot steam pouring from street vents on a city morning. The smell of asphalt just as the rain begins to fall. A basket full of vegetables from the garden. A floor filled with a child's toys, arranged in the chaos of exhausted enjoyment.

He goes on: Don't let the beauty of life escape you. See the world as the temple that it is. Let every experience be church-like. Marvel at the fact that any of this exists — that you exist.

Can you see it? Do you get the idea?

I think about moments like these in my own life.

Sitting out on the water early in the morning before anyone else is awake, watching the light change on the surface. The sound of rain on the roof in the middle of the night. A conversation with a stranger that goes somewhere neither of us expected. The particular quality of late afternoon light through the sanctuary windows. The face of someone who has just received good news they were afraid to hope for.

These moments are not rare. They are everywhere. The question is whether we are paying attention.

Thomas Aquinas called this the study of wonder. The practice of noticing. And he believed it was not peripheral to the life of faith — it was central to it. In noticing, we become alive. In wonder, we find ourselves drawn, almost involuntarily, toward gratitude. And gratitude, it turns out, is one of the shortest distances between a human being and God.

Modern psychology and neuroscience have caught up with what Aquinas knew. Research consistently shows that moments of awe — genuine wonder at something larger than ourselves — produce measurable increases in well-being, perspective, and peace. They quiet the noise. They loosen anxiety's grip. They remind us, at a level deeper than thought, that we are part of something vast and good.

We live in a time when there is no shortage of things competing for our attention — most of them urgent, many of them troubling. The news pulls at us. The demands pile up. It is easy to move through entire days without once lifting our eyes.

But the beauty has not gone anywhere. It is still there, waiting.

The weed breaking through the crack in the sidewalk. The elderly couple walking hand in hand. The child's laughter from the next yard over. The sky at the end of a hard day, doing something extraordinary that no one asked it to do.

Marvel at the fact that any of this exists, Holiday writes. That you exist.

Today, I want to invite you to make your own list. Not as an exercise — but as a practice of attention. What have you walked past lately without really seeing? What has been there all along, waiting to be noticed?

Open your eyes. And as you do, let your heart follow.

Because this, too, is prayer.

Prayer: Gracious God, you have filled this world with more beauty than we have eyes to take in. Forgive us for the days we move through it without noticing. Open our eyes today — to the small and the ordinary, to the surprising and the sacred. And may what we see draw us closer to you, the source of all that is beautiful and good. In Christ's name. Amen.

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