Through Eyes of Faith
by John Fischer

You were planned for God’s pleasure, and bringing pleasure to God is called worship. Put these two things together and you can conclude that living your life as it was meant to be lived is an act of worship in and of itself. It would be good if we could get this concept and actually live our lives this way, but we have a tendency to miss the worship in the ordinary because we are looking elsewhere for the worship experience.

And people are looking everywhere. There is a movement afoot that can only be explained as a longing for a mystical religious experience, and by mystical, I mean something otherworldly. The huge outpouring of sentiment over the death of Pope John Paul II is one example. Interest in end-of-the-world apocalypse stories such as the Left Behind series would be another. The bestselling novel Da Vinci Code and NBC’s new dramatic series, Revelation, both show a rising interest is what one commentator called “religious mysteries.” And yesterday, on Larry King Live, a panel of “experts” explored the whole phenomenon of near-death experiences with a “hereafter.” What is going on here if it isn’t a growing spiritual hunger for a real experience with God?

Which is good and not so good. Good: in that people are seeking God — not so good: in that they have a tendency to look to the mysterious and otherworldly to find Him, and not into the more obvious day-to-day part of our lives. There is an element of mystery to our worship in that we are dealing with the unseen, but we are also dealing with the down-to-earth and the obvious, and if we had the eyes to see and the ears to hear, we would be finding God and mystery in the ordinary things as much as anywhere else. It’s like what Frederick Buechner wrote when he observed the childlike faith of people “who, like children, are so relatively unburdened by preconceptions that if somebody says there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they are perfectly willing to go take a look for themselves.”

In other words, they take the spiritual as something expected. People with childlike faith have no need to explain or explain away God in their lives; He simply is, and He is a part of everything they do. Spiritual things are obvious to children — even mystery. It’s all part of wonder, and worship is a kind of grownup wonder.

We don’t need to go outside of our normal experiences to experience God. We just need to believe, and starting with the eyes of a child, see everything we do through the eyes of faith.


John Fischer is the Senior Writer for Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotionals. He resides in Southern California with his wife, Marti and son, Chandler. They also have two adult children, Christopher and Anne. John is a published author and popular speaker.