Wonderstruck (3 page)

Strewn across the white comforter on the Scottish hotel bed, I breezed through the first few chapters of Genesis and sensed the sacred echo “It is good” with regard to my plan of sharing from these passages over the upcoming week.

Realizing I was a few minutes late for dinner, I rushed down to the restaurant where the group gathered around a series of small tables pushed up against each other. We were the only ones in the hotel’s dining hall, and when a perky young waitress appeared, she greeted us with unintelligible words that sounded like an encrypted form of English. One of the team members, Katie, interpreted: the chef was running late.

Throughout the evening I only understood every third word the waitress spoke and resorted to nodding and smiling through the other two. I managed to navigate the menu with help from
the team. The less adventurous among us,
ahem
, skipped the Scottish standards of haggis and blood sausage for more familiar fare like salad, steak, salmon, and a selection of potatoes cooked a hundred different ways.

Our bellies full, we searched for the quietest room we could find. One of the team members urged us into a vacant card room attached to the hotel lobby. Because the room held only a single brown leather couch and two red leather chairs, we pulled in extra seating from the lobby so we could gather around a narrow glass table.

After explaining my personal journey through Genesis, we took turns reading portions of the first chapter of the Bible. Then we discussed the theological facets the words reveal about our God—a God in whom all things are made and held together, a God who creates goodness and celebrates it at every turn, a God of profound order who triumphs over chaos, a God of boundless generosity and unfathomable power. As we examined the passage, I sensed the familiar scripture awaken something deep inside me.

I asked everyone to share personal hopes, dreams, and desires for the trip as a springboard for a time of prayer. I listened intently. In secret I hoped someone would give words to the thoughts somersaulting through my mind, but no one did.

Then my turn came. “My hope . . . my prayer,” I stammered.

I felt the iron weight of the pause as I grasped for the perfect way to express what I desired from God. I took a deep breath and plunged.

“This sounds strange,” I apologized, “but I’m praying for pixie dust.”

I might as well have vacuumed all the air out of the room. While a few stared uncomfortably at me, more than a dozen eyes darted back and forth in an almost unanimous expression:
what have we gotten ourselves into?

I kept talking. “More than anything, what I long for is our God, the One who bedazzled the heavens and razzle-dazzled the earth, to meet us in such a way during our time in Scotland that we find ourselves awestruck by his goodness and generosity, his provision and presence. I’m praying for pixie dust. I want to leave here with a sense of wonderment as we encounter and experience things only God can do.”

One by one the members of the team exhaled, a welcome sign they were extending grace to me. A few even smiled.

Louie, a pastor whose short grey hair and mustache framed twinkling youthful eyes, broke the silence. “Margaret, I think what you’re asking for is something me and my boys pray for often. You’re asking for the favor of God. We pray for God’s favor both in good times and bad—that we’d sense the reality that we’re one of God’s children, one of God’s favorites, and wait expectantly for what God will do.”

With those words, Louie became one of my favorite members of the team. In closing our devotional time together, we prayed with boldness for pixie dust.

When I returned to my room that night, I tucked myself into bed. The European down comforter left me feeling warm, snug, and enveloped by a thousand feathers. God had reawakened a sense of divine expectation. Though God had been at work in my life in countless ways—revealing so many wonders—I realized that deep down inside I still backed away from living each day with holy anticipation.

Praying for pixie dust was an invitation for God to lavish our team with his loving-kindness, and for each of us to walk more upright, eyes attentive to what God might do next. You can’t pray for pixie dust and maintain a dour demeanor or dreary disposition. The Mary Poppins of all prayers, asking for pixie dust is hard to do without a frolicsome smile on your face, a playful cheer in your spirit, a holy anticipation of how God may answer.

Now, praying for pixie dust is not magic whereby if you say the right words—”abracadabra,” “suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus,”
¹
or “a la peanut butter sandwiches”
²
—something marvelous happens. That’s wishful thinking. A prayer marked by faith is never about what happens on our terms or time lines, but God’s. Faith-stained prayer brings us to a place of trust and hope. Praying for pixie dust is a childlike expression of trust and hope—trusting in both God’s wisdom and winsomeness, finding hope in God’s mercy and mirth.

I often think of Jesus surrounded by eager dads and moms, men and women the disciples dismiss as pushy parents. The Gospel of Mark, an account of the life of Jesus known for its brevity, pauses to highlight the important details of the scene.
³

Surrounded by an informal congregation, Jesus teaches on the mystery of marriage, reminding listeners of their holy commitment, not just before humans but before God. The crowd responds en masse, but it’s easy to miss. Moms and dads elbow their way to the front of the crowd, hoping Jesus will rest his hands on their children and pray for them. The parents respond to Jesus by placing the fruit of their marriages, their most valuable possessions, and their entire futures, in the hands of the Son of God.

The disciples don’t recognize the preciousness of the parents’ response and issue a sharp-tongued reprimand. Jesus is peeved. The Son of God calls the people to repentance, and they respond but not in the way the disciples anticipate. Jesus defends the children, and their parents too, when he tells the disciples to leave the children alone and let them come to him.

The Gospel of Mark records Jesus picking up kids. I imagine Jesus whispering the love of God in their ears. As he prays, some of the children probably tug on his beard; others poke at his cheeks. A few remain skeptical of the stranger and keep their eyes on Mommy at all times. Jesus gives the kids huge bear hugs and twirls the most rambunctious in the air before returning them to their parents. At least, that’s how I imagine this scene
when I read, “And He took them in His arms and began blessing them, laying His hands on them.”
⁴

Against a backdrop of hugs and laughter, Jesus makes a startling declaration: The kingdom of God belongs to those who maintain childlike receptivity. Those who refuse to receive the kingdom of God like a child will miss it entirely.

I don’t think the disciples intentionally discriminated against the little ones; they may have meant well in trying to protect Jesus from being overrun. After all, if Jesus swung one child in his arms, all the kids would want a turn.

Standing in stark contrast to the eagerness and exuberance of the children is the disciples’ curt response. Modern management buzzwords can be used to describe their reasoning. They’re leveraging Jesus’ time, streamlining the day’s activities, creating a win-win for the rabbi and the multitude, maintaining the ministry’s best practices. But Jesus knows something far more valuable is at stake than spiritual productivity or return on investment.

With their heads down, eyes straining for the next step, the disciples lost sight of the wonderment that Jesus came for all of humanity: the bourgeoisie and the peasant, the grumpy and the ebullient, the grey-haired and the bedheads. Despite the miles and meals they shared, those closest to Jesus had lost their childlike receptivity, their ability to recognize that both God’s response to us and our response to God is seldom what we anticipate.

The story stands as a potent reminder of the importance of humility and trust, as well as a personal wake-up call that all too often I’m far more like the disciples than the children. I fail to enter into God’s kingdom. Distracted by efficiency and effectiveness, I lose out on what the children enjoyed that day—simply being with Jesus, delighting in his presence, and humbly asking him to pray for me.

Maybe the best place to rediscover the kingdom of God is bouncing on Jesus’ knee.

For me, praying for pixie dust was an expression of childlike receptivity. More than anything, I wanted Jesus to catch me up in his arms and twirl me in the air.

The next morning, like a bottle rid of the cork, we began our hike bubbling with energy and overflowing with enthusiasm. After the first kilometer or two, each of us settled into a steady pace, discovering our individual cadence on the trail. We also discovered we weren’t alone. The Scottish masterminds behind the Highland Way were not concerned with drawing clear lines between public and private property. We grew accustomed to walking through strangers’ backyards. I even caught a pair of seven-year-old blue eyes peeking from behind a fence post. We managed to sneak in a wave and grin before the figure disappeared in the shadows.

The more entrepreneurial locals along the trail had turned their backyards into trading posts. Add a few makeshift bathrooms to a piece of property, and you’ve got a hiking destination, or what I prefer to call a “running destination” because I ran for all of them along the trail.

The first trading post we visited was an add-on building to the back of a brown wooden barn. A weathered picnic table embellished with fresh rain droplets provided a limited seating area. After using the “glory hallelujah,” my new name for anything that resembled indoor plumbing, I scoured the limited inventory shelf-by-shelf for the perfect comfort food.

Next to the door rested a plywood storage shelf with a dozen cubbies. Each cubby displayed a basket of produce ranging from potatoes to cabbage, dark lettuce leaves to green beans. I grabbed a translucent orange carrot on a whim and circled back to the counter to pay the bored teenage salesclerk.

Brushing off a few grains of dirt, I bit through the carrot’s skin to discover a mouthful of confectionery nutty crunchiness. Returning to the basket, I purchased the remaining stock and shared them with the team. None of us could remember when a common carrot had tasted so good. With each bite, we savored the sweetness of God’s creation.

Midafternoon we passed by the moss-covered ruins of an abbey and an ancient cemetery. Soon after, our feet began to ache with the kind of soreness that whispers the next step will hurt even more. Our pace slowed, and other travelers began to
pass us. One of the team members struck up a conversation with a pair of sixty-somethings whose worn boots and tan lines suggested they’d been on the trail much longer. To raise awareness for an incurable disease, they were hiking from the tip of England to the tip of Scotland. They passed us on day fifty-three of their three-month journey and left us effortlessly in their dust. Invigorated, we forgot about our feet.

The sun flirted with us throughout the day, glancing from behind clouds like a child playing peekaboo. For more than two hours, the golden orb, which seldom makes an appearance in the United Kingdom, graced us with its presence. One of the ladies, Peggy, responded to the royal treatment by lying down on a soft patch of grass on the side of the road. I brushed the annoyance at the delay far, far away and took the spot next to her. One by one we lay next to Peggy, eyes closed, bodies melting into the land. I don’t know how long we were there, embraced by the holy moment of rest, but my cheeks felt warm and my head tingly when we returned to our feet. We stepped back on the trail with a divine awareness we didn’t have before—the discovery that when journeying with God some of the best parts of any pilgrimage are the detours.

Our fearless leader, Joel, had arrived in Scotland with a cough and bronchial ache that intensified with each passing day. I became overly conscious of what for him were unconscious actions: coughing, sniffling, rubbing his nose. Joel conceded to seeing a doctor but not until medical help was hard to find.
After persistent phone calls, he located a Scottish doctor who agreed to see him on short notice. Joel sat patiently in the waiting room before being ushered into a small office with dated equipment.