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Magical

"Glitter falling from the sky," he described yesterday's scene and, indeed, today glitter falls from the sky. As sunlight catches snowflakes drifting off the roof, the snowflakes become glitter from the celestial Shaker, creating a magical scene. This extraordinary and beautiful sight seemed to gently enter our world from another.
This reminded me of a scene in Boyhood where the protagonist asks his dad about magic. “Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right? Like, this second, there’s no elves in the world, right?” The dad responds by describing magical whales and admitting elves do not exist. The other-worldly behavior of whales is magical but I still prefer John's response: "we're not aware of elves in the world but that doesn't mean they don't exist."
I wonder how we foster a sense of magical thinking in children and in ourselves. Perhaps more accurate adjectives would be "extraordinary" and "fantastic." Do we quickly dismiss suggestions of things that simply cannot be such as elves and glitter falling from the sky? Cannot another world enter and impact our world? Is the sacrifice of Christ not extraordinary? Truly, many consider the gospel fantastic to the point of being fanciful and outlandish.
Our faith is at odds with our daily living when we no longer see God's handiwork around us. I believe God entered this world and, in His perfect life and death, paid the penalty for my sin. If I can believe something as outlandish as that, I can bend my mind to recognize God's fanciful glitter on a sunny winter's morn. In anticipating the extraordinary, we more quickly testify to God at work around us.

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