Awe travels slowly like the last drips of honey from the Honey bear. Heavy with rich sweetness, neither awe nor honey are highly viscous. They both tend to move painfully slow from the source to the senses. However, if we are unhurried, little drops of awe will reach us, leading leading us into adoration of the One who Himself is awesome.

When we are too hurried, when our calendars are too full and our minds too preoccupied, awe doesn’t have time to reach us. We fly through our agendas and our errands missing droplets of awe all around us that might have pointed us back to the One who both delivers deserves our awe.

Each week during my Sabbath time, I take a few moments to look back not the week prior and practice being more like the leper who returned to give thanks than the other nine I so often resemble in the moment.

While studying Psalm 33, I was convicted to the core by a few simple verses.

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright…Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe before him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm. Psalm 33:1 & 8-9. 

This past week was full of awesome feats and bits of beauty. A friend whose life was spared through prayer, another friend engaged to the love of her life, college students sharing parts of their stories with me, children fighting through insecurity in sports and showing up bravely to play.

There was no lack of droplets of awe; but there was a glaring lack of awe in my heart.

Despite the fact that there were truly awesome things all around me last week, I did not even have the time in the midst of the chaos to let the droplets of awe fully reach me. I was too busy, rushing from thing to thing, from tax return to tax return, from field trip to field trip.

No time to let the sweet drops slowly crawl down the side of the bottle to reach my senses or my soul.

My shouts for joy in the Lord shorten and slowly disappear when I have not had enough time to receive and process the droplets of awe all around me. This does not make God less awesome. All He is He is eternally. He is essentially awesome and worthy of fear and adoration. It does, however, cheat me of the freeing opportunity to worship and adore Him, which is as much of a gift to my self-obsessed soul as it is to the Lord whom we worship.

However, when I sit still long enough, the sweet droplets reach my awe-starved soul and are returned to the Lord in the form of praise and adoration.

I don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon or the White Cliffs of Dover to experience awe, though I certainly hope that one day I shall do both.

Residue of our awesome creator is all over everything He has made, just like my children’s sticky fingers mark every square inch they touch after they have eaten honey or syrup.

The little tiny flowers that litter the path I walk more than twice a day at the boy’s elementary school often escape my notice. I usually just tromp right by them if I am not crushing them with my carelessness. Yet, one day when my heart was stilled and I was not in such a frantic hurry, I noticed that their center creates a perfect pentagon. Scores of perfect, nearly imperceptible pentagons from the Brilliant Mathematician who is our God.

The slight breeze on my cheeks, the raindrops that have been falling on our formerly drought-ridden terrain, even the little gopher who keeps digging labyrinth-like burrows in our backyard. These are little droplets of awe meant to stir my senses to render praise back to the Awesome One.

We would do well to practice gathering droplets of awe and letting them lead us into humble adoration of the Triune God now. For the believer, the future is full of outright adoration of the Lord; even those who refuse Him will bow their knees in fear before Him.