Lesson Of My Admiration

It hasn’t been but the last few years that I have found infant children to look adorable.  But as a passenger on a recent flight I was completely overwhelmed and exasperated with a pushy grandparent holding an infant grandson, sitting next to me.  The hour and a half flight was taken up with attempt after attempt to persuade me with such questions as "Isn't he a doll?" "Have you ever seen a more loveable face?" “He’s the sweetest of all my grandchildren.” “Isn’t he so good?” 

To this grandparent, working on my conviction was an involuntarily part of the job. Loving her grandson seemed to include the act of telling me to love him. Her admiration alone did not seem enough. She found her adored twenty two month old thoroughly worth the adoration of others.

I very well know it to a behavior recognizable to more than proud parents and beaming grandparents because I am one. I delight to commend what I enjoy not only because it expresses my enjoyment but because it also seems somehow to complete it. "I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free," the song goes. Saying it aloud, bidding others to see what I see, sharing it with my friends or strangers, somehow magnifies my delight.

Last night, I rode the ATV to a place of heavily forested property that Bettyann and I own. She is, away, at our home in Florida.  I sat in the midst of the ever so peaceful, cool, solemn, canopy, listening to the Carolina Chic-a-dee’s voice colliding with the mountain spring, of which we discussed, ten years ago, of how we might develop. I thought, “wow, what an awe moment!” Not having my partner there to comfort, affirm, and share the moment of personal gravity, I was overcome with the longing to carve her name on the tree by which I sat.

I suppose there have been thousands of times in my life, I’ve been overcome with commanding in excitement "Look!” “Stop, listen!” “You’ve got to taste this!” ”Do you feel that!” I like to imagine it’s like the psalmist who wants everyone to see what he sees. He not only praises God with his own song, but asks others to join him. "Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth!" Psalm 47:2-3. In his delight, David calls on others to taste and see the goodness of God. "O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together" Psalm 34:3. He has found God worthy of praise even beyond his own.  

Yet I am a bit saddened when I meet folks, my age and older, for whom this call to praise is problematic. Friedrich Nietzsche once stated, "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." C.S. Lewis stated a similar difficulty in his own coming to belief in God. He found troubling the thought that God ordained his own praise. He was also irritated by the clamorous demand of believing people to join them in praise of their God. 

I believe it to be true that such invocations to praise are often heard, and heard also in the mouth of God. "The people whom I formed for myself will declare my praise," God says through the prophet Isaiah. It is a demand at which we would cringe in the mouth of man, woman, or child. If the little fella my traveling grandmother found so loveable suddenly demanded that she continually fawn over his delightfulness, she would likely found him something other than delightful. But what if he approached grandmother with arms extended and the edict on his lips "love me"? The command to love would only further be intertwined with her delight of him.

I ask myself: how much more so might this be true of One who is worthy to receive glory, honor, and power?

The first inquiry of the Westminster Catechism concludes that the chief end of humanity is to love God and enjoy God forever. As praise is the spontaneous by-product of delight, the command to love and the promise to enjoy are paired inseparably. It is this hopeful alliance that C.S. Lewis eventually came to see. Knowledge of God brims forth in me the overwhelming desire to praise God, while God's worthiness stirs within me a longing for everyone else to join in. 

Father, God I thank You for the not so insignificant fact that Your love and approval of Your son, Jesus, was a declaration You chose to share with me, my family, friends, colleagues, and the world. I visualize that when Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit - Your Spirit descended like a dove and You declared: "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased."  Father, You shared with the world Your love for the Son by the Spirit so that, not only me but every person might take notice and come to delight in You also. I believe that Christ's worthiness is a truth that You wanted everyone of us to hear and know—and subsequently, to praise along with Him.  Continue, I pray to help me do just that!  Amen