The Power of Awe (Episode 5)

How discovering “awe” in your daily life can increase joy, life satisfaction and enhance relationships

Learn more about Brent and Janis Sharpe at www.lifeandlovenuggets.com.

Transcript:

[Brent]: Hello friends, welcome back to another week of Life & Love Nuggets with Brent and Janis Sharp. We're so glad that you're with us. We are excited, this week you're in for a treat. We have been discovering some of the wonder and the fascination and the power of awe. As we study some of the research about this, it's amazing how this can affect our life and so, I heard a speaker recently that talked about this in a wonderful way. Happens to be Janis, she was speaking at a service that we were both in and she did an amazing job with this. So, we're just going to listen in for the next few minutes and talk about the power of awe.

[Janis]: Good morning. Happy season of epiphany. Epiphany represents light shining out of the darkness. It's a prize, new hope and wonder. I think Father Paul actually got an epiphany surprise when he asked me to speak and I said “yes”, because there's many times he says “will you do the eucharist?” and I go “no, I'm not going to do that”. “Will you do this?”; “no, I'm not going to do that” and he knows I'm pretty well gonna speak on anything I want to speak on.

[Janis]: But I'm happy to be with you guys here today. Epiphany really suits me, it's much better for me than the waiting of Advent or the darkness of Lent. I like Epiphany. I have a lot of awe in my life right now. You know, God surrounds us with awe and I have a lot in my life right now, because we have added five grandchildren in the last four years. So, we went from one to six very, very fast. Four of them are two and under. So, we have a lot of excitement that's going on in our lives.

[Janis]: Right before Christmas we had two of our granddaughters that are two and four and we took them to the Sapulpa chute. It's where they've taken four blocks in Sapulpa and they've decorated overhead and it's just beautiful. So, we took Libby and Emma and we had them in a wagon and we were going through the streets of Sapulpa and a parade was going on and so, they were fascinated. All of these trucks going by and they were throwing out candy to everyone. So, they'd throw candy to us and then the people around us, if they saw that the girls couldn't get candy, they'd gather it up and go and put it in their wagon.

[Janis]: So, the girls were having a wonderful time and we got to the place on the Main Street, where you can look up and see the decorations. We were walking along and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something and I leaned down to Libby, the four-year-old and I said “Libby, look, over there is Mary and Joseph and Jesus” and her eyes got really wide and she goes “I didn't know that they were going to be here.”

[Janis]: I had to explain that there were people in costumes, but Libby experienced awe and that's what I want to talk to you about today, the power of awe. I'm going to put my therapist hat on, but I think that at the end of our time, you will sense some of the goodness and the awesomeness of God. But just in case you're worried, I usually speak for a shorter amount of time than anybody else. So, you should be happy overall, we'll get out of here pretty quickly and you'll be happy.

[Janis]: So, for many decades psychological research has focused primarily on studying negative emotions, which of course, we want to get rid of anxiety and depression. We want to get rid of mental disorders. So, of course they're gonna focus on that, but there's a new branch of psychology that's emerging and it's called “positive psychology”. It's focusing on what makes us happier, what gives us more fullness of life, so that we can really enjoy life. I mean, to me, it sounds like the abundant life In Christ. How do we get the good in our lives? This is the field that we've gotten a lot of things in the last few years, that you're very familiar with. You know, we've heard about gratitude, the importance of gratitude. Our mothers told us that years ago, “just be thankful for what you have”.

[Janis]: But we also see in scripture, how we are told to be thankful for all that God has done for us. Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever. Psalms 1-18 starts and finishes with that. We're reminded to be thankful in all things and now, there's research that proves the benefits of gratitude. Just writing down five things every day that you are thankful for, will make you emotionally and physically healthier.

[Janis]: Now, it can't be the same five things, you can't do “I’m thankful for my home, I'm thankful for my family, I'm thankful for my health”. It has to be a number of things; it has to be things that you notice in every day. So, a number of years ago when I wrote a weekly Newsletter, I had a section that I called “Things that made me smile” and this is that type of thing. Like, fuzzy socks make me smile. Heaters in my car makes me smile and I'm very happy for it. There was-- At one point there was a turquoise line down Harvard Avenue. A truck must have had a can of turquoise paint in it and it turned over and so, for a long way there was this little thin turquoise line going down Harvard. It made me smile, it made me happy. It was turquoise, so it was great. What can I say?

[Janis]: I often will have clients write down five things they did right. You know, our world bombards us with things that we're doing wrong, that we haven't done, that we haven't caught up on and so, we beat ourselves up. So, I have clients before they go to bed write down “what are five things that I did right today?” and when I talk to mothers of preschoolers that have toddlers and babies, oftentimes they'll say things like “I didn't get anything done today”. I clean something up and it got messy again and my response to that is “are all your children alive? Have they eaten? You know what? For today that's good enough. Sometimes we have to lower our standards just a little bit”.

[Janis]: I also encouraged people to write down where they've seen the goodness of God throughout their lives and all around them. They can be big things; they can be little things. You know, I saw my son keep-- Healed of a kidney disease when he was five years old. It was huge. I've seen God's direction and provision throughout my life, which is beautiful. But there's also Little Things, I have squirrels and bunnies in my backyard and I really enjoy watching the bunnies, because in the spring and summer they go out of the center of the backyard and we usually have three or four of them and they go through times where they jump back and forth. They're playing with each other out in the yard. It's such a sweet thing to watch and when it gets really hot in the summer, a couple of the bunnies will come up to the back door and just stare at me.

[Janis]: So, I may or may not have been known to take little saucers of water out and put them there just in case, because they just look really thirsty and I'm much cooler inside. Last summer I was sitting out by the pool and I kept hearing this little tiny splashing sound and I was ignoring it, ignoring it and then I went out and there was a baby bunny, not even four inches long and it had fallen in the pool and it was trying to get out. So, I reached down with the net-- I'm not going to touch it in case it was a rat or something, but I reached down and I pulled it out and I set it in the grass and I watched as the sun dried its fur and it fluffed out a little more, a little more and then, it happily just hopped away. It was a sweet thing. It was a sweet thing from God to have those beautiful little creatures there. How amazing and thoughtful is God to provide us with something so sweet.

[Janis]: Now, those of you that are gardeners, you're thinking “yeah, but bunnies eat the plants”. I have started planting verbinias in one area of the garden and I call it my bunny salad bar. They never have any flowers on them, they just the bunnies all come and eat. So, hopefully that's enough to keep them from eating anything else.

[Janis]: Another practice that's come out of positive psychology is mindfulness; I'm sure you're all aware of that. It's being present of where you are right now and focusing on what's going on right now in this moment. It's not pulling out your phone, it's bringing your brain back when it's thinking about what you have to do tomorrow, but it's focusing on the present moment where you are. You have to let go of the anxiety about the future or the regrets of the past. You let yourself experience the goodness of being right here, right now.

[Janis]: I often tell people “This is the time that we sit silently and we breathe in the goodness of God and we're thankful that we have life in him”. Over our study we have a sign that says “be still and know that I'm God”. We need that Stillness in our lives, but the thing that has me fascinated right now, the thing that I'm studying the most about is the concept of awe. So, can you imagine being with the disciples in the boat and a storm is raging all around you and Jesus is laying there asleep and the disciples wake him up and he stands up and he calms the sea and the storm? Can you imagine what that might must have been like? Or what about when Tabitha came back to life again? What awe would we experience in that? Or seeing blind men see, laying men walk. There's so much awe throughout-- Throughout scripture.

[Janis]: But awe is not new, God created awe before the beginning of the world. Maybe long before that, we don't know. But it's been here and now, we're researching it and now, we're finding and proving that it has incredible benefits. Children experience awe a lot more than adults do. You know that if you've been around them at all and Jesus calls us to come to him as little children.

[Janis]: I think that includes coming to him with a sense and a spirit of awe. New Year's Eve this year we had all the grandkids and all our kids with us and we decided to do s'mores in the backyard over our chiminea. So, we told the little kids “okay, we've got blankets and we're going to go outside and we're going to roast marshmallows and do s'mores in the backyard” and they ran outside and one of them went “we're camping!” and so, they got so excited, I had to go get all the sleeping bags we had and I put them out there and they're running in circles going “we're camping! we're camping! we're camping!” and then I looked over at one point when it was quiet and there were-- There was a four-year-old and two two-year-olds laying on the concrete, one of them just had the sleeping bag over him, not under him, looking up at the sky. That would last a minute or so, and then they'd get up and run around some more and say “we're camping!”. They found wonder and awe in something that was so simple.

[Janis]: I think we've become desensitized to awe; we've become jaded. We're so busy in what we're doing, but we've stopped being married sitting at the feet of Jesus and we've become Marthas. So busy with everything going on in our lives, we're missing the awe in life that God has for us. So, how is awe defined? This is the research definition of awe: Awe is when we come across something so vast or profound that it transcends our understanding of the world. I think awe is the magic that everyone is looking for. With each study that's come out, we're finding that awe is very powerful. Awe can transform our lives. If we can get more awe on our daily life, studies have shown that we'll be less stressed, healthier, happier and more connected to people around us.

[Janis]: Awe is a universal emotion, so people across all cultures experience awe and they have almost the identical facial expression. That's not true for all emotions. But with awe, people of all cultures have the same facial expression.

[Janis]: When we experience awe, it lowers our blood pressure, it reduces inflammation in our bodies and it helps us relax. You know that part of your brain that triggers the fight or flight? You know, I call it the cat over the bathtub response, that…

[Janis]: Awe actually triggers the part in our brain that calms that down, so it helps us be more relaxed. But it's not just a physical change, awe takes us outside of ourselves, it causes us to no longer focus on the minute details and the concerns of our life. It's actually been shown to make us less materialistic; it causes us to see life into perspective and it connects us to God.

[Janis]: Research has shown that when we experience awe in our lives, we move towards other people and to something or someone greater than ourselves. Awe moves us towards God, it causes us to be much less selfish and much more community-minded. So, there was a study that was done on a college campus in California. They had 90 people; they took 45 of them to a grove of beautiful eucalyptus trees. They were like 200 feet high and they took 45 people to the science building.

[Janis]: So, the group of the eucalyptus trees were asked to look at the trees for one minute and the other group was asked to look at the science building for one minute. After the minute, they had actors that walked by each group and they dropped a huge box of pins. The people who looked at the eucalyptus tree were much more likely to jump up and help clear up the pins and put them back in the box, than the people that were looking at the science building. So, just looking at things of beauty and awe causes us to be more helpful, more concerned about people around us. But not only that, the group that looked at the tree showed a higher degree of ethical decision making and it showed that they had much more patience after the experiment and they were more likely to volunteer or donate time.

[Janis]: Awe causes us to see things into perspective. Our life and our problems are not nearly as large as they seem, when we look at them compared to the world and compare to God. Awe reminds us that we are connected to all the people around us. The Apostle Paul reminds us we are all one body.

[Janis]: In the last year or so I've been drawn to one particular section in the Book of Job. Not, you know, a book that I normally read a lot, but I've been drawn to this one particular section and in the past, I always saw it as a negative thing, but in the last year or so, I've started hearing this section from a loving God talking to his child. I'm only going to read a small part of it, but it's when Job finally talks to God and God's response back to him. “So, listen to God's gentle whisper, where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand who marked off its dimensions. Surely you know who stretched the measuring line across it. On what were its footing set or who laid its cornerstone? While the morning star sang together and all the angels shouted for joy, who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb? When I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness? When I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place? When I said this far you may come and no farther? Where is your proud waves halt? Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place? Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of deepest darkness? Have you comprehended the vast expanse of earth? Tell me if you know all of this, what is the way to the abode of light and where does darkness reside? Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? Surely you know, for you were already born, you have lived so many years”.

[Janis]: Sometimes we need to be reminded that God is God and we are not. Awe makes us feel small in a positive way. Researchers call it “the small self”. Astronauts experience this, anyone who has gone into space and they've looked down on the earth, they've seen all. The heavens above them, the skies around them; they come down changed. Astronauts come down and generally, they develop some type of non-profit organization, they become-- They're more involved in philanthropy or they do things to help other people, because it's put so much of life into perspective. They've seen something bigger and they've been changed by awe.

[Janis]: We get so caught up in our problems, we forget that life is not all about us. We focus on ourselves. We have to accept-- I have to accept that I am small and God is so much bigger than I am. He created this incredible world and all that's in it, and I can trust him with every area of my life. My theory is if he spoke the world into existence, pretty sure he can handle anything that I have going on.

[Janis]: Our God is an awesome God, but how awesome is it that God set the world in motion, he created all this, he created all this beauty for us and yet, he knows every single hair on our head? He knows everything about us and he loves us deeply. Our God is an awesome God and he has wonderful things around it, but we miss them, because traffic is bad on Yale.

[Janis]: And I've got a report to do and, is that my car making a weird noise? What's going on? We get distracted by the things of life. So, how do we experience--? How do we find awe? There's certain personalities that are more prone to awe. They are curious, outgoing and more adventuresome, but it is shown that any personality that experiences awe, also increases in those characteristics. So, if you're not naturally curious, you become more so by experiencing times of awe; it can be developed in US.

[Janis]: Most Americans say that they experience awe in nature; Americans rate that higher than any other culture. Not sure why, but nature is fascinating and they find awe in nature. I think about times of awe in my life when we were in Mexico and we went whale watching with our friends and we didn't realize that we were going to be in a very small boat. We are watching and while we were there, the whale we saw it coming and then it went underneath our boat and out to the other side and it was awesome. Scary, but awesome. I was going “do they ever have things like, where the whale comes up and your boat is on top of the whale or anything like that?”. But it was awesome.

[Janis]: I remember when we were in South Africa and we were down by the ocean and we were outside and we laid down and we looked at the stars and there were more stars than I had ever seen in my life. They were bright and beautiful and the sky was so dark; such a sense of awe. Going to the mountains, the beach, the national park can help you experience awe, but it doesn't have to be going somewhere. There's nature in Arkansas, in Turkey Mountain, in the gathering space. There's nature in your own backyard if you would just take a look at it. It's all around us.

[Janis]: These are gifts from God, beautiful gifts. The changing of the leaves. Even seeing a bare tree against a beautiful sunrise, that's a gift, that's a gift of God that is nature. I always say a trip to Southwood is one of my experiences of awe, looking at all the plants that are there. I mean, if they had espresso, I'm pretty sure Southwood would be God's perfect place. I don't know, but I'm-- Just what I'm saying. We experience awe by looking at art and beauty, museums, architecture. Henri Nouwen, the author, got fascinated with Rembrandt's painting “The Return of Prodigal Son”. He studied it for a long period of time and he wrote a book by that same name and he came out of that experience with some of the richest deepest insights into our relationship with God, our relationship with each other and just how God has called us to live. If you haven't read it, I really, really do recommend it.

[Janis]: We're experiencing awe in reading or hearing of miraculous stories or by hearing of acts of bravery. Reading biographies of people who have done selfless things. Those can create awe in us as well and they found that even looking at awesome things on a screen has the same impact on us. So, making sure your screen saver is something that has awe in it. Watching videos of mountains or animals, nature, all of those things can create that sense of awe in us.

[Janis]: Reading scripture about the parting of the red sea, the feeding of the multitudes, the faithfulness of God to his people. The gospels, if we meditate on them, if we imagine what it's really like to be there, we can experience awe and I think-- And this is not the research, but I think we can have awe in helping others. I don't know how many of you remember a number of years ago, when we were connected with a grade school in town, where a lot of the people were struggling financially and at Christmas, the social workers said a lot of people need furniture and you guys, generously gave so much of furniture that you have in your house and Brent and I and a group of people, got to go around and collect the furniture and then, we got to go to the families and to see the generosity of the people that gave and the thankfulness of the people that received, it made it a beautiful Christmas for us. There was awe in that.

[Janis]: I always encourage my clients to have what I call “snapshot memories”; you may have heard me talk about that. It's times when you're in your life and you're like “this is good, things are good right here. I like where I'm at, I feel at peace, I feel content”. One of my clearest ones was our 25th wedding anniversary and we were on the Isle of Mull, in Scotland and we were playing golf and it was a very hilly course. They usually didn't let Americans play on it, but they felt we were fit enough to do it, it was 20 years ago. But we were on this course and we were up on the highest point and we looked out and you could see the sea around the island and then, there was a field next to the golf course and it was May and it was lambing season. So, there were sheep with newborn lambs and the daffodils were blooming in the pasture.

[Janis]: I mean, you couldn’t have made it more perfect, but I remember standing there going “this is a beautiful place. I'm happy with my life, I'm happy with my husband. Things are good. I know the goodness of God in my life” and so, when things get hard, I bring that memory back up again and go “that's reality. Reality is we are good, we are safe in God and we can trust in that, whether we see it right now or not”.

[Janis]: This summer Brent and I had the privilege of going to the Isle of Iona, in Scotland again, with a group of people from John Brown University. It was specifically to seek God, it was a kind of a pilgrimage, it was a week-long trip that we went on. To get there we had to fly to Glasgow, take a four-hour train ride, then take an hour ferry ride to the Isle of Mull, then take a 45-minute bus ride and then take a 15-minute ferry ride to Iona. You have to be going there to go there, it's not something that you just happen in on.

[Janis]: In the 6th Century before there were planes and trains and buses and ferries, Saint Columba sailed there with 12 other men to establish an Abbey. People came from all over Great Britain to Iona, they took the trip to get there way back in the 6th Century to hear the gospel and they were converted and they went out throughout Great Britain and there were many, many conversions because of the people that went to Iona. People still go there.

[Janis]: We got there, there's no TV, there's no internet, there's very spotty cell service and I went expecting that in our group, we would have lectures and we would have study times and I was kind of geared up for “okay, we're going to be working hard here”. That is not how the program is set up. We had dinner together, sometimes we had breakfast with a few people. We had a short inspiration or inspirational or instructional meeting most days, the maximum a half an hour and the rest of the time we were free to do anything that we wanted to do. So, we hiked, we read, we played. We went to church every night in the Abbey that was there. We sat and talked with people that were around us. I had really great naps when I was there and we sat on the beach where Columba had landed with his 12 disciples and we thought about what it would be like back in the 6th Century, to come in this small boat because the call of God brought us there.

[Janis]: I left the island refreshed, renewed and reset and with a new sense of awe and wonder. One day we had a time of silence and it was from breakfast in the morning until afternoon tea and so, I walked down to the end of the Island. The island is three miles long and about a mile and a half wide, so I walked “there it is”, there's looking out at the ocean and I walked-- I walked down to this particular beach and there was a bench there and I sat there for hours and I prayed and I read and I journaled and I felt the presence of God that was there.

[Janis]: I want to remember that and when I look-- Brent put that in there, I didn't want to picture me.

[Janis]: I had to have pictures because I wanted to remember that sense of peace, that sense of awe, that connectedness. Just looking at those brings me back to that place. But it's not my imagination, research has proven just looking at pictures where you experience that peace, will bring it back to you again. To experience awe, we need to be intentional and attentional. We don't just hope for awe to happen, we seek it out. We need to slow down and notice the things that are all around us, turn off our cell phones, set time aside, we have to be still.

[Janis]: My sister passed away five years ago from breast cancer and my sister found joy and awe in every single thing of life. From the plants, she would call me and she would tell me “Oh, this plant is getting new blooms on it”. She loved her neighbors and so, she would get so excited about making cookies to take over to her neighbors or so-and-so was sick and so, she would make them dinner and take them over and she would call and say “there's deer up on the mountains” or “we got this much snow” -- She lived in Colorado. “We got this much snow”. She had a fascination with those types of things, but she really loved plants and she had one bedroom that was full of plants and she watered them and she took care of them and she'd clean off their leaves and she had a Christmas cactus that she had for many, many years and it would never bloom, but she decided “well, we're in Colorado, even in the house maybe, you know, maybe conditions aren't right for us” and so, she just kept nurturing it year after year.

[Janis]: She passed away in early December and our family went to Colorado for the memorial service and the morning of the memorial service, I got a call from her husband and he was crying and he said he got up that morning-- I'll probably cry too. He got up that morning and he looked in the plant room and the Christmas cactus had plant-- Had bloomed that day for the first time ever.

[Janis]: He said it was a sign from Sandy, from God. The next year it bloomed on the date of her death. Wat an awesome and sweet thing for God to do for us. I try to look for awe everywhere, every day. I sleep with my curtains open. Now I only open them after we turn off the light, so none of the neighbors can see us, but I sleep with them open so that if I wake up in the night, I can see the stars and first thing in the morning, I can see the sunrise. I want to celebrate the things that are around me. I look at frost and the patterns in frost, I look at animals, I even kind of like the possums in the backyard behind my office that I watch walking across the fence.

[Janis]: A geeky thing I've been doing lately is I've been looking at the sunrise and sunset of different places that I have gone to, because when we were in the Isle of Iona, I never saw it dark. The sun set so late. So, when we were there in Iona, the sunrise was at 4:52 and it set at 10:08. So, it was kind of dark in between, but not very dark. But now, today, I looked it up and the sun rose at 8:49 and it set at 4:21 and that's not even the shortest day of the year.

[Janis]: Our world is amazing in how God created us. I get fascinated with those kinds of things. I try to find stories about beautiful, brave, miraculous or joyful things that have happened. When I'm reading Jesus, I do try to imagine that I am walking reading Jesus-- Reading the gospels. I do try to imagine that I'm walking with Jesus or I'm a part of Exodus. I imagine what it would be like to lay down in green pastures. I think it's like the place in Scotland, but warmer.

[Janis]: Have an awe of God, of all that he's done, the creation he has blessed us with. It's healing, it is healing for us. In the midst of the crazy world that we're living in, it can restore our souls and the coolest thing ever, the number one thing that people universally say is their number one thing that causes them awe is the birth of a baby. How amazing that our God came to redeem us, to heal us, to set us free and it came as a baby. How awesome is that?

[Janis]: Albert Einstein said “there's two ways to live. One is as if nothing is a miracle and the other, is as if everything is a miracle”. So, I want to end with a sunset out of our window on the Isle of Mull. I don't know how well you can see that, but I pray that this season of epiphany brings you an epiphany of the goodness of God, his love for you and the awe and the wonder that he has for your life. Amen.

[Brent]: Didn't she do a great job? She is my favorite speaker and favorite above all others. So glad that you were able to be with us today. You know, as we think about awe, part of this is just being more aware and paying attention to the awe that's happening around us and then, there are some things, there are some practices that she alluded to that we can begin to focus on and we can begin to do proactively, that can allow this strength to start developing in us, by simply being aware of the wonder that's in the world. So, blessings as you go into your week. Peace to all of you.

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